I have seen the sun split the morning fog over Laguna’s Andretti Hairpin, heard the crack of an impact wrench bang against the garage walls at the Nürburgring, and munched on a sweet Grand Marnier crepe at 3:00 am while watching the cars bend around tetre rouge during the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I have been blessed enough to enjoy some of the best the world of motorsports has to offer. None of this quite prepared me for the sight of 135 dudes crammed into a non-descript small warehouse feverishly gluing, soldering, and calibrating 1/10 and 1/12 scale race cars.
Other than a crowded parking lot, there was no sign that there was even a race track in the squat beige building, which looks more like a space used to package and ship dental supplies. But here champions will be crowned, hopes will be dashed, and a few thousand gallons of energy drinks will be consumed.
This is the 2025 ROAR On-Road Electric Carpet Nationals, the premier “on-road” event for electric radio-controlled race cars in the United States.
Santa’s RC Car Workshop
As I walk into the double doors of New Rochelle’s “360v2 Raceway at Foredom Hobbbies” a few miles north of The Bronx, I see a guy truing tiny tires in a sewing machine-sized box. This room is quite small, right at the entrance, and I make the incorrect assumption that this is where people share the one tire lathe provided for the competitors.
Walking through the next sort of doors, my eyes are opened to how extreme this event really is. Workstations are crammed together, each one crowded with soldering irons, battery chargers, small hand tools, brake cleaners, tire lathes, tupperware containers full of parts, industrial tape, copious salty snacks, and small vials of liquid whose contents I can only guess at.
I’m legit shocked to see so many people doing this, and my surprise is only compounded by the fact that every room I walk into is like this. There are more than a hundred of these mini garages stacked on the same Lifetime folding tables used by everything from voter registration drives to church coffee hours.
There are guys everywhere. Some have humidifiers running, although whether that’s for the car or the builder I’m not sure. The energy in the room isn’t frenetic, exactly, but no hands are still. It’s like Santa’s Workshop if all of the elves were dudes in their 40s or 50s wearing baseball caps and building RC Cars.
Sticking out in this crowd is the guy in the red shirt. Donny Lia. He’s the one I’m supposed to talk to. He owns the track.
He doesn’t want to talk to me, though. At least he doesn’t want to talk to me yet. He has to finish his car and get it ready to race.
To Finish First, First You Must Finish
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I’ve been around long enough to know the look of a driver focused intently on a task, so I leave him alone. The difference between most drivers I’ve met fighting for a championship, though, is that they usually don’t also have to build the car, set it up, and tech it before they race.
No worries. I wander over to see the carpet that defines this kind of racing. Seriously, companies sell the carpet rolls in 100′ x 12′ size, so most of these tracks are approximately that size. It also helps that you can lay out 4′ x 8′ sheets of plywood and create a base that naturally fits underneath. The carpet is designed to allow the cars to dart around the track with a maximum of traction and a minimum of fuzz, which can kill tiny parts and motors.
It’s Saturday and most of the day will be devoted to qualifying to determine who will race in the different “Mains” that night and the next day. This setup works much like short track racing, where drivers compete in a certain number of heats to see if they’ll end up in the top-level “A-Main” or a lower-level “B-” or “C-Main.”
Unlike Sebring or Daytona, no one is getting on my case for walking right up to the track. ROAR, the sanctioning body, requires racers to marshall the heats they’re not in on a rolling basis. No one seems bothered that I’m so close, although I make sure not to block the elevated stand where the drivers are lined up.
As I wait for Lia’s race to start, I watch a batch of 1/12 scale modified cars make turns that would be impossible in anything other than an F1 car. Maybe. The electric motors let out a high-pitched squeal that competes with the sound of the sleek plastic bodies cutting through the air.
I’m watching one car in particular because every time it comes around the last turn before the straight, the driver tries to cut the curb, causing the car to bounce up and down. I keep waiting for a crash and inevitably it comes. One of the marshals inside the turn attempts to turn the car around, but the driver first tries to correct course by gunning it, which causes it to fly off the curb and hit the marshal.
My eyes widen. Hitting a marshal in most racing would result in a black flag for the driver and a red flag for the course. Everyone here, including the marshall, just laughs.
“I stuck the landing!” screams the driver, to more chuckles.
The next race features Lia and his bright yellow modified 1/12 car. There are numerous classes, but the most important characteristics are size, body type, and power type. The “touring cars” are larger and, generally, slower, with bodies that look something like a McLaren 765 LT and an Audi R18 had a baby. There are also LMH cars that look Le Mans Prototypes, and even a class for 1/10 scale F1-cars. The fastest cars, though, are Can-Am-style modifieds.
I can hear the announcer mention Lia’s name as he continues to rack up faster and faster laps. In these qualifying sessions, the drivers aren’t going for a specific laptime but trying to finish under a certain time. I switch positions to get a better angle and something happens. Lia’s car breaks. His race is over.
There’s A Lot Of Money Being Spent Here
“I broke a gear,” Lia explains to me when he’s done racing.
This isn’t a usual thing to go wrong, and now Lia, in addition to talking to me, is going to have to get his car set up again for another qualifying session so he can make it, hopefully, into the A-Main.
All of this in addition to hosting the event. I’m curious, are most of these people local or is this truly a national event?
“There are about 135 entrants, and about 80% are from other states. Name a state, they’re here,” he tells me.
Lia also races super stock, but he enjoys the modified 1/12 class because it’s “the fastest class in all of RC.” His setup is serious and, clearly, a lot of money has been invested.
“It’s like a hobby” he says to downplay it, though I point out it’s also his track. “Yeah, it’s a business, it’s not my full-time business.” That business would be selling cars. Lia has all the bearing of a professional race car driver, which makes sense as I later find out that not only did Lia race short track, he competed in NASCAR’s Truck Series and actually won a race.
Sensing that I want to get into details about the car, Lia walks me around the corner to one of his competitors. Drew Ellis, who also happens to be the manager for Team XRAY, a representative of the Slovakian RC company Hudy, its XRAY brand, and its American arm RCAmerica. He also owns a race track in Missouri.
“This whole side, this is Team XRAY,” he says, pointing out the many rows of desks and guys in matching shirts. One of them, a driver on the younger side, is his son. This kind of racing has become his life and he’s even competed, and won, as part of a team on the international stage.
“I was super competitive and I was into the racing side. I did BMX when I was younger,” he tells me. This kind of racing appeals to that side of him. “It’s a competitive thing, it’s a one-on-one sport. Obviously, there’s a team element of tuning and setup, but when you’re on the track it’s you versus the track or the other drivers on the track.”
The racing is competitive, though the risks are lower. In my own time racing I’ve seen an amateur rack up a $150,000 repair bill from Ferrari in an afternoon.
“Obviously, this is less expensive than real car racing,” says Ellis. “I can’t get hurt, obviously, I can trash my car and walk away.”
It’s less expensive than “real” (as in full-size) racing, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily cheap. Especially if you want to compete on a national level.
“To get into the hobby, if you don’t have all the equipment, if you’re going to buy everything brand new, you’re looking at $2,000, but you could easily get into it at $6,000,” says Ellis.
As he talks I can’t help but stare at his chassis, which is an experimental steel one he’s testing. The actual car itself consists of a servo to control steering, a brushless motor for power, and a motor controller unit. There’s a differential out back to control the amount of power being sent to the rear wheels, and a carefully calibrated suspension. He lets me spin the differential and shows me the Diff Check Plus he has, a small device that allows him to check and adjust the “hardness” of the diff – the differential’s amount of resistance to diff action, which is adjusted by changing the viscosity of thick silicone oil inside the diff.
“We can do all kinds of changes to the car, like a real race car,” Ellis explains. “Anything you want to adjust on this car, you can adjust.”
You’ll notice the suspension arms are actually a carbon fiber piece that’s surrounded by plastic, which gives the arm more ability to bend without snapping, which can happen with just plastic.
The amount of time and effort put into making small changes can have a big impact on the racing. In some of the modified classes the times around the track are in the low 8-second range, and a small difference can add up over 50+ laps.
A Contentious A-Main
The setup of the different “mains” has the A-Main race repeated three times with each driver’s worst result thrown out, which means you can have a terrible race and still win overall. To some degree, this removes the luck factor that makes motorsports exciting, but it does help to make sure that the fastest driver usually wins.
On Saturday night, the first of the three A-Mains was held for the 1/12 scale Modified class, with top qualifier Samuel Isaacs edging out Kemp Anderson and Lia, who qualified third (if the embed above doesn’t work, you can follow the racing here).
Unlike the qualifying races, everyone here is lined up in the order they qualified, although the grid is a little unusual compared to the tight grinding you see in other races. This helps avoid everyone crashing in the first turn. The race is only eight minutes, but that’s still long enough to do 50+ laps.
Right away, the top three drivers distance themselves from the rest. It only takes a minute for all three drivers to catch up to lapped traffic and, remarkably, the lapped cars quickly duck out of the way. That’s something pro-level drivers can’t always do.
With five minutes to go, Lia is putting consistent pressure on Anderson, who goes wide around the “short chute” and gets passed. Lia then goes to work methodically following the leading Isaacs, hoping to force an error. The cars seem impossibly close. Lia, again, gets around, with just a couple of minutes to go.
Now the situation is reversed, with Isaacs charging at Lia. He gets a break when Lia gets caught up in traffic. With just 10 seconds to go, Isaacs and Lia collide. Isaacs is just far enough ahead after eight minutes to win, with Anderson sprinting far enough ahead to put himself in second.
That’s racing, even at 1/12 scale.
Great read! Thanks for bringing up old memories… I miss my amateur RC racing days in the 90s and early 00s. From gas and electric 1/10th off-road outdoors to carpet touring cars and F1.
Lewis Hamilton started in RC cars.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/av/34615671
Interesting read Matt. This is why The Autopian rules!
My mom wouldn’t buy me and my 4 sisters Legos or Hot Wheels because they were too expensive. We did, however, have a Tonka dump truck and a cement mixer with which many happy days were spent playing in a sandbox.
That said, this looks like tons of fun! Eventually, I’d like to get an RC car and try it out.
ETA my cousin Doug had a slot racing track and we all had lots of fun with that, when his family lived nearby. Good times!
BP monitors on these guys would be fascinating.
I know the RC car scene in the mid to late 1980s was pretty big. Most of us were into the offroad type vehicles, I personally had a Marui Hunter followed by a Kyosho Optima. The place we went to had an indoor dirt course and a carpet course for like what we see featured here. The only reason I went offroad was because I could use it at home. The kind in the article I couldn’t have run. No place in the house I could do it except the kitchen and that would have gotten me grounded.
How does that compare to full-size racing though? I’m betting race teams spend more than six grand a weekend just in consumables.
I’ve never raced but I was getting into 1/10 scale RC drift before COVID closed the track and then the local scene sort of fell apart before they could properly reopen. I can’t really speak to top level racing but a lot of the costs for RC cars are sort of one time things. I was about $500 into my car but that was it. Once you had a good setup, you don’t really need to put any more money into it unless you break something or want to upgrade.
There are consumables in the form of tires and belts if your car uses them but they’re cheap enough to where it isn’t really an issue. A set of good RC drift tires ran me about $20 and they’d last for ages. I don’t know what RC race tires go for but I’d be surprised if they were really that much more than the drift tires were.
Yeah, I meant the full-size race car probably going through $6000 in tires for a race weekend. I expect the RC running expenses are pretty trivial.
I’d be very into this if we could use an internal camera and a wheel/pedal/monitor set to drive it from a first person view.
I have seen tiny camera/transmitter setups made for giving a cockpit view from an RC plane broadcast to a tablet attached to the hand controller (even better, the video I saw of it being demonstrated had it positioned where the pilot’s head would be, and the cockpit was fitted out with an instrument panel, little pilot figurine and control column attached to the servos, so the controls moved to match the movements of the plane!)
With that, a driving simulator rig of seat/screen/wheel/pedals, and some suitable electronics talent the right person would probably be able to build a setup like that without too much trouble!
It is a pity they have all gone inside and batteries.
I remember watching outside RC racing on a specially built asphalt track, with stands, with real gas motors — two stroke Baby Bs, for one class, right up to, from memory some 20cc monsters which looked and sounded as though they escaped from a weedeater….
Those things were fast too, over 100 kph, and marshals were well behind barriers. Big scandal was someone suspected of using a radio jammer on opponents, as well as the usual allegations of motors not conforming to class.
There’s even a company that makes Wankel rotary engines for RC planes, I’d love to have one in a model RX-7.
That’s amazing, great article Matt!
As soon as you mentioned the name, I thought “wait….that Donny Lia? Truck Series winner Donny Lia”? Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
I’ve oddly enough caught this racing a time or two on the Speed Sport channel and the reaction times and reflexes these guys have must be on the higher end of what’s humanly possible. And now seeing the intricate detail in the building and adjusting, it’s definitely a unique world of motorsports. Super cool article.
I like building and modifying RCs but I don’t think I could ever actually race, the amount of control and speed the drivers have is insane and the cars can get stupidly fast for how small they are. I’m impressed everytime I see one of these races.
Same here. These guys are in a level so far above what casual RC fans think is “fast”. I’d much rather be putting around a track, racing my friends while having a couple beers.
100% agree, I would “race” my Bolink Eliminator back in the late 80s but in reality, it was more “fly down a straight and either smash the wall or spin out turning before I hit the wall, repeat x5 laps” than it was “race.” Cars I have seen more recently seem even more crazy today. I grabbed all of my gear from my parents and hope to revive them some day with my kids
It’s amazing how far the tech has come. I grabbed some of my stuff from the late 2000s and was able to swap out the electronics to some Amazon grade Chinese components and they really fly now.
I was trying to wrap my head around all of that, sourcing whatever batteries are used today, speed controllers, servos, even just replacing the metal-fatigued springs for the shocks. It would probably be cheaper to just buy new, but not as satisfying, but it will be a challenge
I totally agree. These changes have really amped up the RC game (dad joke achieved). I still can’t believe how fast the new RC trucks are that my dad and I built. The only change that I don’t like is that it has gotten harder to find a mid-tier build-it-yourself kit. You’re mostly stuck with ready-to-run, Tamiya or race level gear. Not to crap on Tamiya because they have some neat and fun stuff, but I want to see a selection of kits in the $300-$500 price point. It would put the hobby into the “nice LEGO” category and would be something that you can build, display and play with.
I built an Traxxas Slash 4×4 from parts from E-bay and built it, rather than by the R2R kit. Then did the same for an Arrma Outcast and Kraton.
It probably cost me twice as much, but the fun was four times as much so I still came out ahead lol.
It still blows my mind there a whole industry out there making aftermarket parts for these things.
I just enlarged all the pics looking for Adrian. </s>
Skimming through the pictures, I don’t see the Gruesome Twosome and their Creepy Coupe anywhere, so it’s safe to concur Adrian’s absence.
The speed in the video really got to me – I could imagine getting into a good rhythm lap by lap, but then making adjustments. These folks have quick brains and reflexes, especially as they get into traffic.
I have never got over seeing this video for the first time many years ago: top-level slot car racing. Literally unbelievable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwkRd6zHwg&t=101s
I love some rc racing! There is a small carpet track in the hobby shop in town that allows up to 1/16. My daughter got a redcat volcano she wants to take and try out.
I’ve never really been into RC cars, but one day, a couple years ago, the algorithm tossed a carpet racing documentary up in my feed.
I figured “What the heck…” and hit play.
Could NOT stop watching. The stories were great, and the racing shots were incredible! The filmmaking wasn’t super professional, but the story was just riveting! The movie is just called Carpet Racing. Check it out!
Sadly, I can’t drive an RC vehicle, although I’ve tried often. Once it’s pointed in my direction, my brain can’t make the shift with left and right. Hats off to everyone that can.
I still enjoy watching it though.
Try crawlers. The little ones are a blast in the house
Yes! I have a 1/24th scale crawler, it’s a lot of fun just throwing random household things on the floor to make courses. For about $100-150 bucks all in they’re a blast.
Cool, that makes it less of a barrier and more fun for me. Thanks for the info!
No prob! The Axial SCX24 is a great small-scale crawler, and they’re under 150 including battery, charger, and controller. That’s what I have, with a Jeep JL Wrangler body.
I have been into RC for a long time and seeing pro racers run 1/12 modified is still wizardry to me.
Those transmitters can do a lot of electronic wizardry. Throttle curves, exponential for inputs, drive modes and more are doable. Plus the gimbals are incredibly sensitive. Even a $200 transmitter is noticeably nicer than the included transmitter on even a $1200 Xmaxx. Breathe on that throttle and the car responds. Make a slight adjustment to the steering and it’s responding. Those pro transmitters are probably on another level yet. Not sure if things are fast enough where latency becomes an issue like it can in aerial RC.
Great article.
Opening my eyes to different views of auto related stuff is exactly why I’m a Autopian member.
Thank you
Same here! I’m here to learn, since girls couldn’t take shop when I was in junior high and high school. We were stuck in home ec, which I hated. I can cook (it’s basic chemistry) and stuff like that. Shop class would have been much more useful.
Thank you, Autopians!
My Uncle is very much a semi-pro slot car racer.
I tried it once, on a pro racing track.
I never wanted to do it again, that stuff is INSANE.
Once it becomes competitive, having fun goes out the door shortly after
That’s insane! I can’t imagine the control the “drivers” have to keep that little mosquito true. I’m sure I’d be off the track at the first turn, much less dozens of laps holding that line!
I didn’t get a look at any of the controllers; what type of setup do they use and is that standardized for every entry?
Basically everyone is going to be using a wheel and trigger type radio from 1 of like 5 major companies. The basic layout is the same on all of them but ergonomics, tuning options, and latency all vary.
I can picture that, thanks.
At this level, the guys are probably running some pretty expensive radios. Something like a Futaba 10PX or Sanwa M17. At least that’s what the fast guys run in off-road. I assume it’s the same deal.
Usually you’re free to use whatever radio, ESC, and motor you want (unless it’s a stock or spec class race), as long as you meet the minimum weight requirements, dimensional requirements and whatever else is required by ROAR.
Bunch of people running the Flysky Noble around where I am as well.
Whoops, I should have thought to include that when I gave it a read-over. Adding now …
Awesome to see you cover this event Matt. I’ve been R/C racing for about a decade now and one of my friends was at this race and won the GT12 class and got second in LMP. I’ve raced against him many times and it’s what I imagine what racing against a young Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen in karting would be like.
I’ve done a fair bit of racing with 1/10 buggies and stadium trucks, primarily on carpet, but I don’t think I could do the on-road thing. I don’t have that kind of skill. They are cool as hell to watch though.
It’s an amazing hobby.. I’ve been building and racing RC cars of all sorts for like 30-ish years now, and I’m always happy to see new folks get exposed to the world of RC cars and racing.
I raced on a carpet oval back in the 90s, and even in stock class the cars were so fast you could barely tell your blur from somebody else’s. The bright and crazy paint jobs are an absolute necessity.
For a year or so, my local indoor track back in Minnesota ran a Tamiya M-chassis spec class. That was a lot more fun, the cars were controllable, and looked more like real cars.
The indoor track I raced at back in Portland did a spec class with the Tamiya racing semi trucks. Unfortunately it didn’t really become a permanent thing, but I loved it. Way less intense than running the 1/10 off-road classes, which made it more enjoyable.
Funny enough I just went oval club racing at my local track last night. I know you’re partial to the Bolink/RJ speed cars and we get a ton of entries for the legends class, had 12 cars registered and I would have got 3rd in the A-Main but got too aggressive and smacked the inside wall which sheared the left front wheel off of it.