Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 16, 1992 TAG: 9202140213
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NEW RIVER VALLEY 1 EDITION: NEW RIVER
SOURCE: JUDY SCHWAB CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
HOT CARS, FAST TRACK SPILLS, THRILLS ARE PLENTIFUL, BUT THERE'S NO BLOOD AND
CHRISTIANSBURG - There's a hand-lettered list of rules on the wall at Dad's Day Off Model Car Speedway.Rule No. 5: "Everyone is required to have fun."
People follow this rule.
The interior of the speedway, located in a no-frills warehouse, is all particle board and male concentration.
And they need to concentrate to send these little vehicles whizzing around the track.
"There are no caution flags," said Alan Duffy, the manager at the speedway.
Dad's Day Off Model Car Speedway is not into dude decor. The place has fluorescent lights suspended above a twisting, tilting plywood track about 3 feet high. The track is built to one-tenth the scale of the real Daytona track in Florida.
Workbenches around the walls serve as repair pits for the radio-controlled model cars and their operators.
Men and boys gather at the benches between races and fix their cars with screwdrivers, soldering guns, glue, tape and hope.
There's a pervasive sort of Saturday afternoon-in-the-garage feeling to the place. There's also a lot of guys named Daddy here.
Boys old enough to race their own cars, like 10-year-old Timmy Tucker and his 13-year-old brother, Stacy, operate like satellites around their dad, Stephen, as he works on cars and just helps with the races.
Younger boys are taken by the hand and guided away from the busy pits and the turns of the track. This is definitely a place for dads and sons.
They arrive with tool boxes stuffed with extra car parts, batteries, chargers, tools, and who knows what else. They set up working areas, some with lights and vises, and they get down to some serious tinkering.
The place is filled with the sort of focused attention that comes from competition.
Boys who look like they've had much better things to do than wash their hands for the last two years ask complex questions about gear ratios - the kinds of questions their math teachers might be surprised they knew to ask.
When the racing starts, drivers stand around the track with transmitters in hand.
The little plastic vehicles in their wild colors whine around the track like mosquitoes from hell. And they crash - into each other, into the wall, into the infield. Unlike their lifesize counterparts, drivers are not hurt and the cars are flipped back onto their tires to keep on whining and whizzing. Cars have been known to go as fast as 75 mph, Duffy said.
Some of the cars chatter with loose parts, but they continue to go. One car began to lose its body, but continued to speed around the track, its loose parts clattering like novelty false teeth.
This unstoppable little machine tore up the duct tape used to hold the carpet pieces of the track's surface together. Then it zoomed around and was wrecked on the tape it had just torn up.
A high-speed collision with loose duct tape is not a pretty sight.
Radio-control car racing is serious business. There is a national organization that furnishes rule books on the subject - ROAR, Radio Operated Auto Racing, a non-profit outfit.
There are professional drivers with sponsors.
There are $800 price tags on some of these cars - and that's without the required electronics, which adds another $150.
"They work exactly like a real car - you can put real oil in the shocks, change the tires," Duffy said.
The operators are mostly fathers and sons, fathers without sons, sons without fathers.
Duffy said there are women professional drivers at the national level, but Dad's Day Off hasn't attracted any female racers yet. There is the occasional woman watching the action as her husband or sons race their cars.
The clientele is mixed, though. Judging by the variety of vehicles in the parking lot - pickups, a battered old Chevy, a Saab - these guys represent a lot of different professions.
Jon Garber has a brand-new degree from Virginia Tech in ocean engineering. He plans on "leaving town as soon as I get an offer from the real world."
In the meantime, he and Duffy, a Tech engineering student, time qualifying heats and races, collect money from the drivers and sell car parts and snacks.
The snacks are dispensed from an old-fashioned candy jar and a plastic foam picnic cooler.
The customers are charged when they put a car on the track. They are not charged to work on their cars and, as any race fan knows, more time is spent fixing than racing.
They can, however, get some of their money back from racing. The winners are given a percentage of the take for the race they won. It is possible to go home with more money than you brought, but not by much.
Races are held Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. The track is open for practice runs Tuesday and Thursday nights from 6 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon.
At a recent race, Dave Schuh, owner of the speedway, stood at a bend in the track behind a microphone calling the cars by their numbers as they passed him.
The numbers were entered into an Atari computer system by Garber as Schuh called them. The cars run races of four to five minutes, and the car that runs the most laps wins. The race is also timed with a stopwatch to take care of ties.
All transmitters for cars not in the race are impounded behind Garber, who also works at the track. You don't want someone else on the same frequency controlling your car during a race.
These cars race against each other according to size and weight classes. They are all about 12-15 inches long and represent models of real cars and trucks - Chevy Luminas, Ferrari Testerosas, Chevy S-10 pickups, Big-Foot-style pickups, '79 Camaros - you name it.
The builders paint them in wild colors or go with a theme - such as the black panel truck called "Grave Digger." Or the comical monster truck with a Gumby riding in the back.
Non-racing drivers act as turn marshals. If a car smashes into the track wall or collides with another car and is overturned, the marshals flip them onto their wheels and point them in the right direction.
Sometimes the marshals leap onto the track to sort out the wrecks and take refuge in the infield until they can get back off the track.
Some cars completely give up the ghost or can't navigate, their little wheels twisted by accidents. The drivers leap onto the track, grab the cars and head for the pits to fix them in a race against the clock as Schuh keeps calling out numbers from the whizzing cars left in the race.
Between races, practices and general business, Schuh is busy constructing an indoor "Mickey Thompson" off-road dirt track downstairs.
Duffy looks forward to racing the dirt track and predicts being able to "get a good 5-to-6 feet of air" under the cars on the jumps.