I've been trying to decide on whether or not I should buy myself my first nitro car. I was going to buy a new xxx-t cr for a new racing season at the indoor carpet track, but it closed down. We used to race during the winter months, and now that I haven't got to race so long I am really starting to miss it. There is a track about 30 minutes away and I will soon be getting my license, so now I can actually drive myself to the track instead of getting a ride. The track is called Southbound raceway, {www.southboundraceway.com} they have an indoor offroad track, outdoor offroad track, and an indoor oval. The problem is that they only race nitro on the off-road track and I've always just been used to electric. I thought that electric was cheaper than nitro, but with all the matched batteries, chargers, equalizers, my novak gtx, and the mamba max I purchased last year I am starting to wonder. I know I have the mechanic ability for nitro, but what about the cost. The fuel I would be buying would be o'donnel 20%, which is about $30 a gallon in tower. Is that the standard price for nitro fuel. I was also wondering how many runs to a gallon would I get if I got, say, an xtm xterminator 2 or an hpi firestorm. I don't want something that uses up $30 dollars of fuel in no time. Any advice would be appreciated. I am new to nitro and have only seen two of them in real life, even though I've watched tons of videos online.

There was a article about this in a RC mag before. Basically by the time you buy a bunch of good packs and replace them after they start to slow down some you spent just as much as a nitro. Not sure how big of a tank the truck you mentioned has but heres the conversion for you 1 US gallon = 3,785.4118 cc. Also i know XTM are hard to find parts for. Make sure you can get all the parts for the truck before you buy one. I had to search on teh internet for like 15 mins one time trying to find a pullstarter for a friend for a xtm car.

thanks for taking the time to reply

i've got both nitro and electric and my experience is that to get relatively equal vehicles/performance you will spend relatively equal amounts of money

as far as nitro usage, of course it depends greatly on the fuel tank, vehicle, engine, conditions, driving style, etc - just like asking how long a battery will run on a charge - but if you figure that most MT's have a tank around 150cc then you'll get about 25 tanks from 1 gallon. If you figure that a tank will last between 10 - 15 minutes then you're looking at a run time of between 250 and 375 minutes, or 4- 6 hours per gallon of fuel.

I've always wondered about that, thanks

Those both have 75cc tanks, I just thought I should point that out. So far over 5 months I have used 1 gallon of fuel. I bought one gallon of 20%O'donnel fuel for $20. I guess it depends on how much you drive or will be driving your truck.