SRB Madness

SRB stood for Special Racing Buggy in Tamiya circles.

These overweight, over engineered radio control vehicles were for all intents and purposes the radio control cars that started the entire off road racing scene. It's truly amazing to think that off road radio control buggy racing is such a recent development. First released in 1979 as the Rough Rider (model number 58015), this SRB was soon followed by the Sand Scorcher and the Super Champ.

What was truly amazing about these vehicles at the time was that they were the first radio control vehicles that could be driven in the park at was was then considered relatively high speed and jumped over tree roots and little ramps yet looked truly realistic, sadly unlike today's speed missiles which barely resemble anything in 1:1 scale.

Almost counter intuitively, with the arrival of the SRB came a fantastic cottage industry of hop up parts to bring these vehicles to a new level of performance. Companies like RCH, CRP, MIP, JG Manufacturing all popped up and began to provide almost every conceivable part to fully rebuild an SRB to the point that there would be not a single original Tamiya part left of the car. Perhaps the greatest example of this was the Pitstop Taipan which was sold in Australia by the Grenenger family out of a hardware store and was the compilation of every hop up goody in the universe combined into one buggy. These babies traded for AUD750 In the day. Insanely expensive but oh so desirable to all the wonder eyed kids growing up back in the early 80s. What these hop up parts did in enhancing the performance of the buggies, it deteriorated in terms of aesthetics unfortunately. But to me it was totally drool worthy and I always dreamed of one day being able to build one of these heavily modified SRBs.

One of my earliest childhood memories of RC cars was the purchase of a Tamiya Super Champ. In those days the local hobby store did not unfortunately have any hop up parts for sale, and mail order was also a slow and painful process. Accordingly I was confined to reading about the hopped up buggies in magazines and dreaming. One such article which I was absolutely delighted to recently track down on the Internet was found on the always fantastic Tamiyaclub website (http://www.tamiyaclub.com). The article has been reproduced from Tamiyaclub below.

Over the years as I grew up and lost interest in RC, this specific article and the thoughts of hopped up SRBs left my mind. But just last year, I decided in earnest to look for a buggy with all the hop ups that I could find. These are few and far between even on eBay but with a little patience (and a whole lot of dollars) I finally tracked down a couple of examples. A few more have recently appeared on eBay and I am saving to buy a few more as these buggies truly are high up on my list of desirables to add to my collection.

Both examples currently in my collection appear to be well restored models based on the Super Champ (see rear bumper) and each has a slightly different variety of hop up bits on it. The idea for me is to ultimately find different examples of SRBs exhibiting as many different variations of hop up parts as possible. But this requires a real fist full of dollars given most examples will only be traded for over USD1,000 per buggy if in good restored example.