When I first got into this hobby in 1983 I was racing with a newly formed club on a dead end street in front of a school in Brooklyn, NY. Some lady told the cops that there was "drag racing" going on. So a couple of cops came by and saw our activity. They gave us no trouble at all. They only asked questions of curiosity as they had never seen anything like our R/C cars before. That was 1/8 scale on road gas cars, nitro as we call them today. Me and my two friends were the first ones to have Associated RC 500's while everyone else was running Rc 300's. It was my very first time out and I won too!

Sometimes I would take th car out to an empty parking lot by myself to make sure it was working OK before a big race and I never had any trouble from anyone. Just occasional passers-by that were curious because they either never had seen an RC car before or certainly never seen one that could move that fast.