Fall '03

Of Race Cars & Model Airplanes:

Have you ever noticed that most vintage race car lovers and owners, when questioned, will show a remarkable knowledge about other mechanical things? Aircraft are obvious. So are ships and, sometimes watches. When they were kids, I’d lay a bet that the majority built model cars and airplanes.

I flew model aircraft as a kid. You know, those things with oily engines that we used to sweat over building for weeks, take it out and get cut fingers trying to start the darn thing, and then promptly crash it. Well that was us, (my friends and I), to begin with.

Then we got into control-line speed and team racers. It wasn’t long before we’d cracked 100 mph with a team racer, (plane built to cover 100 laps on one ounce of fuel with any engine up to a .29 cubic inch capacity). To cover the 100 laps entailed some four “pitstops” with the pitman wearing a glove with electrical contacts on the fingers to light up the glowplug for a quick start after refueling with a methanol/oil/nitromethane brew.

There’s a lot of comparison between car racing and model plane racing. I know, I’ve returned to the model airplane fraternity and find, to my astonishment, that the average age of those participating is late fifties. When I asked where all the teenagers where, I was told: “They’re all watching computers”. Indeed, some are, but a careful perusal of the customers into my local hobby shop, (headed, incidentally, by a nice man who owns a Westfied Lotus 11), shows a whole bunch of late teenagers who race radio control model cars. Engines are screamers, revving to 34,000rpm. Speeds of well over 100mph are common. Eat that, F1 car lovers!

Back to our racing. As I said, there is a pitman. And a pilot. It’s the pilot’s job to fly the plane. And also go in for some artful tactics! Just like “nudging” in our car races, the pilots sometimes engage in a spot of “leaning” on each other in the center of the circle to gain a better tactical position!

There’s also a strange commonality between model engine sizes and race car engines. In models, the most common size is probably a .29 cubic incher. This basically equates with the 302/305 cubic inch car engine size. If you want to go bigger, the most common size is a .35 cubic incher, equivalent, I suppose, to the good old 350 V8. Smaller? .15 cubic inches, equivalent to a 2.5 liter Climax? Bigger? anything from .40, (400 cubic inches), to the real monsters of .60 cubic inches, huge Can Am big-blocks! Today, these are achieving over five horsepower, the equivalent of 500 horsepower per liter. Once again, eat that, F1 car lovers!

So. How many of you out there are still building/flying/running models? It would be interesting to know!