ORIGINAL: yakfish
Ok, so I have been apart of and overheard some people discussing the subject of racers v. bashers reffering to which cars/trucks are designed for which purpose. I was at my LHS this morning to pick up a few things when I overheard a couple guys arguing about which truck was a better basher. One of them made the argument the truck was not a good basher because it was designed to be a racer. We have all heard someone say that car/truck X is a great basher but not too good as a racer. Or car/truck X is a fantastic racer but not too good of a basher.
Here are a few observations I have made during my time spent around and with RC. I don't race any of my RC's (not that I have anything against racing) I just like to be able to drive when ever and where ever I want to without having to mess with the ''rules''. I have always liked to do my own thing and from what I have heard from racers they spend much more time in the pit than on the track running anyway. Having said this many of the best RC's I have owned have been designed and marketed to racers. These have always been the most reliable RC's for me and have taken abuse much better than other RC's that are marketed to bashers. And the trucks that I have owned that are designed to be bashers(I will refrain from mentioning names because I don't want the fanboys to get fired up) tend to be more on the delicate side and they typically don't handle nearly as well. Right now my two favorites RC's I own are a Losi 8ight 2.0 and an 8ight-T 2.0. These are most widely marketed to racers. But I bash them and they do much better than the RC's that were designed and sold as bashers. The best RC I have ever owned where a couple Mugen MBX5T's. They where most definently higher end racers but they werealso the best bashers I ever ran. I set my uncle up with an MBX5T that had been converted to brushless and he bashes it. I have a brushless MBX6T on its way as we speak and it will be bashed as well.
Anyway my question is. Are bashers really built to suit bashing? Or are they built to look cool and then marketed to noobs who can't afford racers? Or do people just get sucked into the marketers claims that car/truck X is designed to be bashed? It has been my experience that cars/trucks designed to be racers are much better in every catagory than their basher counterparts. What makes an RC a basher or a racer anyway?
I think you have hit the nail on the head for the most part....race machines are built with performance and reliability at the forefront of priorities for the designers...Bash machines are built to grab people's imaginations and sell well off the showroom floor...... Bash machines are most definitely targeted at newbies getting into he hobby, with a platforms perceived success or failure 100% based upon its sales volume.....The more gizmo's and doodad's the basher has the better its likely to sell..... the doodad's and gizmo's don't really need to actually work well, or even work at all....what matters is that the product grabs attention on the showroom floor...Very little concern is given to whether the product functions very well or not....How it looks is of more concern then how it performs..... ....By contrast race machines are built purely for performance and reliability, with zero concern towards cosmetics...race machines proe their worth on the race circuits, either a platform performs well, or it doesn't....and with racing all the machines are run side by side, head to head..so the manufactures are kept on their toes and unable to sell substandard product and get away with it....the racing scene is a very tight knit group that rapidly shares information, if a car doesn't perform reliably everyone around the globe hears about it...... By contrast a bash machine is seldom going to be compared head to head against other brands of bash machines, so the manufactures tend to be able to get away with putting out substandard product and get away with it with very little complaint...By contrast if a manufacturer puts out a substandard race machine the entire racing community will tear it apart and the people who bought the product will demand corrections be made.... One bad car can literally destroy a manufacturers reputation in the market, which in turn destroys the sales of that product.........Since all the racers compare notes and often test drive each others machines they tend to be a very well educated market and a much more difficult market to succeed in....Products designed for racing are held to a much higher standard then products designed for the bashers....comparable to buying a Chinese knock off dirt bike from the local hardware store or buying a true racer motocross bike from one of the big 4 like Honda..... The hardware store bike looks similar, costs 1/3 the price, but is nowhere even remotely close to the level of product the true factory motocross bike is..... True race machines cost more money, but they will usually deliver a much higher level of performance and a much higher level of reliability........want to see how poorly built some of the bash machines really are ? take them to the local track for a day and see how well hey hold up....Racing tears these machines up far worse then I think people would expect...
One thing I will say is that racers likely burn a pile more fuel then bashers do..it is not uncommon for a racer to burn 10 gallons of nitro in a race season....I know of very few bashers who even come close to burning that amount of fuel.... Anyone who thinks racers don't spend much time running their vehicles couldn't be any more mistaken.....Some guys at my track will burn 1 gallon/weekend...every weekend.......There are some racers I talk with who will burn 10 cases of fuel per year, that is 40 gallons of nitro in one year...............