RC Racing

One Sunday about a six weeks ago I had some time to kill and found myself driving through Woodbridge, Virginia. Actually, the particular area I was in is referred to as Lake Ridge. Anyway, I noticed that there was a Wild Bird Center in the Dillingham Square Shopping Center so I pulled in. I have been looking for a low profile bird bath (no, not for me; for the birds attracted to the feeders in my yard) for some time now and thought that maybe they would have what I was looking for. Well, they were closed (they open a little later on Sundays).

But, across the parking lot I noticed a gathering of people that were "running" RC race cars. So, I stopped to take a look. They had a race track set up. It was pretty darn sophisticated compared to what we would set up for our $15 cars when I was a kid. They had some kind of a computerized starting gate that tracked the cars each time they passed under a pipe that was stretched across a piece of the track. This served as the start/finish line. Each car was equipped with a unique "chip" and apparently there was a sensor in the pipe that fed the car's lap time to the computer. How slick is that? And the "drivers" were into it. Some worked on their cars out of the back of their car or truck while others had a work bench setup under a sun tarp. Exactly what kind of adjustments they were making on their cars is not clear to me. Some had step ladders to stand on while they were racing to get a better view of their car while it was on the far side of the track. The event was sponsored by Hobbytown USA. They have a store in the shopping center. Apparently, this activity has quite a following and goes beyond the local area.

Having my camera gear with me, I thought, "hmmmm....a mini-NASCAR or Watkins Glen. Let me see if I can make something out of this." Panning came to mind. That would best be accomplished on a straight away. However, access to the only straight away was blocked by the real cars and trucks of the RC "drivers." It was a parking lot, afterall. So I decided to situate myself at the end of the straight away that lead into a good turn. I only had about an hour and they were experiencing some technical problems with the computer start mechanism But, luckily, many of the drivers used that time to make practice runs so I was able to make some images.

These cars are fast. I found that you have very little time to actually capture them as they pass by. I believe that these cars are more difficult to photograph than a full size race car. There is much less surface area to focus on, making tracking it and panning very difficult. I started using a spot on the track to pre-focus and wait for a car to hopefully pass over that area. It didn't work particularly well. But I did get a few decent images, I think. I got a lot of blurry, way beyond the unusable, images. On some, as you can see, I got half of a car. Got a lot of those, too. I'm gonna have to get out there again some time.