Wow, I didn't realize that so many of you guys/gals had RC cars. They are truly wonderful machines, that can carry the same technologies as the full-sized scale racing cars.
I subscribe to RC Car Action and RC Nitro. Both are great mags. However, I haven't heard too much about the speed contest latly. Last I knew it was delayed until after June and hadn't heard too much about it after that.
I did have a few ideas for breaking the speed record, but didn't have the resources to make them come true. Of coarse there is always the route of taking and boat load of batteries and hooking them up to a low turn brushless motor. I would say Lithium polymer batteries would best suite this application. But, it would be rather interesting to see a nitro break the record.
Have any of you seen a tether car in action? They are capable of reaching speeds of over 200 mph. That is realtime speed, not scale. In other words just as fast as some of the fastest full size cars on the road these days. the catch is that they need a "push start" to get going, but once they do they rocket up to 200mph in not much time.
Here is a vid of them in action(scroll down almost to the bottem of the page):
http://www.radiocontrolzone.com/cars/video.asp
If you were to take either a brushless motor or a nitro engine to get a tether car configuration up to speed, that would take place of the human "push start." You would need the primary drive system to get the tether configuration up to about 80mph before it could take off on its own. 80mph is how fast the "push start" gets the tether car going to before it is on its own.
Hopefully the weight of the tether configuration in the car wouldn't weigh it down so much that the primary drivie system couldn't get up to speed(80 mph). It sounds logical, but this would call for a great R & D in aerodynamics and chassis distrabution to accomplish this. Anyone confused?
I have always been interested in this hobby, and because of it I had already had a good resource of info about robotics. I say this to encourage people to look into this hobby. It is not only to have fun, but 3/4 of the time you find yourself working on them, matinenceing them, or learning about them, rather than running them. It definately is a worth-while experience.