i understand when people say tc is too expensive. i almost agree. but my perspective is that tc compared to 1/12 is too expensive. i still have over $1000 into my 1/12 and radio. I am not including the tools and other support stuff. if i were to swap for a tc, i guess it would be $1300-$1500. and then the recuring cost would prob go up another $100-$200/month. but for a newbie entering, they need to know these costs.
RC is not the only hobby that I have been involved in. before this i love to track my 1:1. i am not talking full race, just track events. this was lots of fun. I did about 6 events a year. it was more expensive then rc, i can tell you. just tires alone, it ran $2200 a set. you go through about 2 sets a year. plus every event they require a safety inspection be done on the car and all fluids be replaces. that was a good $300 each event. event cost was $300 and then the hotel for the evening. and that was every other month. not to speak of brake pads, brake rotors, and other consumables. and guess what? each even was limited to 400 people. the last event i ran was 2 years ago. if you did not sign up in the first week, your were probably not going to particiate in the event. oh, and btw, this was all BMW and Porche's for these events. so tell me that $$$ was an issue for these guys.
reason i stopped was not the cost, but RC was every weekend and gave me the chance to learn setup. hard to do setup on a 1:1 every other month on a different track each time. yes membership has dropped in SCCA, but event are still full.
previous to that, I shot olympic archery, long story short, i had my bow bag stollen. there was 2 full setups in there. and after going through insurance, the total was $12,000. some of the stuff was not even for sale. i had stuff only the US team had. and i was doing this in college. the sport was small, the olympic trials that i participated in had a total of 300 competitors in the US. that included men and women. you had to qualify, so that was not the whole membership. a starting setup would prob run you $3000-$4000.
and the list goes on and on. as I talked to different people with different hobbies, i have not found very many that say their hobbies are "cheap". most that invest a good portion of their time, also invest a good amount of $$$. and when i compared cost and initial investment with them, usually rc is on the lower end of the scale
i think the thing to remember is that people invest at different levels. but to have guys that show week to week and are there to make a race program grow, they are probably the guys that invest $400-$500 a month these are the anchors of the program. we have guys that are there every club race and probably invest $100-$200. those are the core or foundation of the program. but the guys that show every so often are not the ones we look to "grow" our program. as a matter of fact, these are the guys that tend to kill the program. the eb and flow guys tend to take racers out of the program. they are great when they are there, but when they leave, a couple people that were the foundation drop away.
i am not proposing to tell the newbie that they need all the top of the line gear and their initial investment is $2000-$2500. but be realistic. it is going to cost $600-$700 to get what you need to race an rc car. if you want, you can go used. I usually tell people, especially when they are starting out to figure in $100-$200 a month in recuring. that is race fees and cost of consumables. this is for 1/12. TC for a newbie is prob in the $300 range. factoring the fact that parts will break. funny thing, if you lower the cost of rc as a whole, so that people have little initial investment and little recurring cost, attendance will not improave. people just have less invested so, they invest less time. I think Mike's hobbyshop has proved this time and time again. at one point the shop put 6 cars together for people to run, they just had to sign up. they did not even have to pay for parts. guess what, even the people that enjoyed running the cars and said they would be back the next club race to do it again, they never showed up again. people need to be invested to come back.
It's funny, THINGS THAT ARE FREE ARE JUST NOT WORTH OUR TIME.