Operating an RC track is a labor of love. Sure, it can be profitable when done right, but it’s hard to comprehend just how much work it takes to build and maintain a track and associated amentities unless you’ve been involved on the business side before. It’s typically a thankless job, requiring plenty of heavy lifting, long hours, and constant planning.
You know what makes it even harder? When racers are horrible, disgusting slobs.
A nearly every race I’ve attended this year, the once sparkling-clean pit area that greeted drivers upon the beginning of practice was left in shambles by the time the trophy presentations wrapped up. Header cards, parts bags, used tires, boxes, food wrappers, cigarette butts, and other junk left strewn about the tables and grounds. Piles of trash scattered around work stations clearly indicating that the driver never even bothered getting his lazy ass up from his chair, but rather simply dropped whatever was in his hands and left for someone else to pick it up. Restroom paper towels discarded in the vicinity of, but not inside, the trash can.
How much more arrogant and disrespectful can you get? Those of you litterbugs who feel like you’re above cleaning up after yourselves are like a bunch of snotty teenagers exacting revenge on your parents for not letting you live in your own filth and squalor. Sorry, but “whatever - I paid my entry fee. Someone else can clean it up,” doesn’t cut it.
I don’t understand how even the bad apples in a group of people who can rave about how great a facility like Silver Dollar RC Raceway (or RC Tracks of Las Vegas, or Fear Farm, or OCRC, or any other track we’ve visited) is - and then trash it. Given the size of the “bushel” of those who attend these events, the percentage of the “apples” who have spoiled rotten is staggering.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the phrase “don’t $#!* where you eat.” Trashing a facility built specifically for you to relax and enjoy racing your toy car is a perfect example of what that adage means. Even stray dogs and cats are smart enough to figure that out - why can’t toy car racing humans comprehend that?
Speaking of “$#!*,” it may be worth considering adding basic potty training to drivers’ meetings at RC races. In case you haven’t noticed, many outdoor tracks are held in locations without permanent restrooms - which means that the race organizers have to plan for portable toilets to accommodate the attendees - and even the nicest indoor tracks typically have only a few stalls. When you decide that urinating all over every surface (the toilet, the seat, the flush lever, the handle, the door, the toilet paper roll, etc.) will be entertaining, you’re not only grossing out the employee that has to clean up after you, you’re also negatively affecting your peers.
Just this past weekend at Silver Dollar R/C Raceway, a track operated by perhaps the most gracious hosts of any RC race ever, the port-a-potties were cleaned a few times throughout the week before they ever even got to the point where they needed attention. And yet within just a couple of hours after a routine service, someone decided to defecate in the urinal of one of the units. I can just imagine an adult male with his pants pulled down, squatting and leaning at the required angle to do such a thing, laughing to himself “won’t this be funny? I’ll have to sit somewhere and spy on the people who walk out disgusted.”
On second thought, I can’t imagine that - because it’s disgusting, deplorable, and detestable.
I’ve been to motocross races and rock concerts with tens of thousands of fans, and beer festivals with hundreds of appropriately intoxicated patrons, and I’ve never seen the level of barbaric, flippant insolence as regularly displayed so often when a few dozen toy cars hang out together.
If you’ve ever done anything like that to a hard-working RC track owner and fellow members of our tightly-knit community, you should be ashamed and embarrassed. If you’re a team manager and you ever catch one of your sponsored drivers doing anything like that, you better fire them on the spot. And if you know someone who has done anything like that, and you didn’t do anything to discourage the behavior, you’re part of the problem.
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