Now we get to the meat of the car. This is where the time, research and money come in. When I first learned of the release, I figured I would build the car and run it. Box stock. The more I've been reading, the more I've learned about "vintage racing". It turns out that vintage off-road racing is starting to take off. Quite a few people are racing original RC-10's and keeping up with modern cars. There's a guy at my local track that does this. The problem with vintage racing is that it takes a fair amount of money to get a RC-10 competitive and reliable enough to withstand a racing environment. Modifying a RC-10 also isn't as simple as walking into the hobby shop and asking for parts. I have done countless Google searches and have quite a few threads "bookmarked" as well.
I'm a racer. I can tell myself that I don't want to race this car, but it would be a lie. While I don't plan on racing this car weekly (like my Tamiya TRF201), I do plan to bring it to the track and hopefully spark some interest in starting a vintage class.
On RC10Talk.com, a poster asked the question, "Who's going to be the first jerk to dye their white parts black?" Apparently, white suspension parts is a big deal to the classic community. I could care less myself. In fact, I find black to be much nicer if only because it doesn't get stained from the dirt like the white used to.
Here's a picture of a box stock front end. There is a lot that will need to be addressed here if I want to improve the handling of the car. Original RC-10's had short a-arms and are much narrower than today's modern cars. To widen the front of the car, I'm going to add a set of Associated wide front a-arms (#6206). Since the arms are black, I'll dye the rest of the white parts pictured above black to match.
Quite a few people run a longer front shock on their "modern" RC-10's. Associated claims that they've improved the stock shock on the re-release and I'm going to work with them for now. The shock tower pictured is the stock, fiberglass unit. To save a little weight and to continue with the "black scheme" I'm going to add a carbon fibre tower from RC Carbon Works.com (#CW-016)
The original RC-10 came with threaded rods for the tie-rods and steering linkages. Thankfully, thirty years later we have adjustable turnbuckles. Associated now sells a complete turnbuckle set with ball cups (#6259). This will be a very welcome addition and will making camber and toe adjustments much easier.
The last item(s) that I'll replace on the front end will be the steering setup. When I was a kid, everyone replaced their stock steering setup with a ball bearing unit from A&L. After a Google search, I found that not only is A&L still around, but they still have the steering kits available (#1080).
Front end parts list
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