WHERE’S WALDO: The mashed potatoes of RC morality

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By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com 

I was poking around in our Facebook page insights yesterday when I stumbled across one post in particular that triggered more negative feedback (in the form of users choosing to hide the post, choosing to hide all of our page’s posts, or even unliking the page) than any other over the past month:

It was a photo noting that a ten-year-old had won a national championship.

Does that news sound familiar? You probably heard about it — and even more likely, the direction and intensity of your response is related to your manufacturer loyalty than anything else. Like multi-generational fandom for major franchises that compete in professional stick-and-ball sports, the ingrained connection RC racers feel with the companies that make their favorite products tends to cloud their judgement when it comes to matters of right and wrong, excusable or indefensible, ill-advised or illegal. In the same way that some football fans vilified Ben Roethlisberger but stood behind Brett Favre, those who post social media tirades complaining about any particular RC driver do so from a total void of moral high ground.

Sure, you can be frustrated when someone does something you don’t like, but be careful that your grandstanding doesn’t expose you as a huge hypocrite.

Do you know what kind of person walks around saying “if I owned an RC company I would never sponsor a driver like that!” as if it was a qualified argument? The kind of person that doesn’t own an RC company. Similarly, if you would truly never spend money with a company that has never enabled bad behavior, you wouldn’t have an RC car. And because we know that sponsorships and direct sales are becoming increasingly popular as each segment of the market gets more flooded with competition, this pious pile of posturing is only sure to grow. That whole schtick about sponsoring drivers being solely about finding good representatives who paint the brand's products in a positive light died years ago, and the fact that your Facebook profile picture is of you wearing your custom-printed RC t-shirt when you ascend to the top of your soapbox proves it.

The revolving carousel of team-switching and ship-jumping, combined with the relatively few degrees of separation between any two people in this industry, means that no dogmatic dissembler is truly disconnected from the kind of acting out that offends them. Can you please tell me the name of a top pro driver who has never melted down at the racetrack, who only represents companies that doesn’t also sponsor someone who has melted down? I’ll wait.

If you’re okay with a 30-year-old giving a turn marshal graphic instructions on self-pleasure, or grown men using their toys as eight-pound cannonballs of revenge, yet you can’t handle a child yelling because he crashed while racing at one of our hobby’s most prestigious events, the problem is with your own values being as inconsistent and moldable as triturated tubers. And if you’ve somehow differentiated your own passive-aggressive attacks on the drivers’ stand from those of anyone else with some flawed metric (“Yes, I screamed and told him he didn't deserve to be here — but at least I didn’t drop an f-bomb!”) then you’re just a self-important schmuck.

Besides, there’s no way that one kid’s meltdowns does any greater damage to this industry we all claim to love so dearly than any number of social media comments, anonymous chat room trolling, rambling podcasts, or any other totally-not-grown-up responses that signal jealousy and wholesale partisanship more than actual desire for change. If you really just want what’s best for our industry’s future, set a better example and consider mentoring the youngsters (and parents) at the local track. You certainly don't have to be happy about what you perceive as being harmful, but you do need to make sure your response won't just make things worse.

As for the race that happened a couple of weeks ago, it's over — and the kid won. He drove incredibly well all weekend. While you’re busy talking about him like the guy that got picked to start on the high school football team instead of you, or offering unsolicited parenting advice, he’s going to be busy practicing — and likely winning more races.