Review: Essential Touring Car/Offroad RC Racer’s Guide | CompetitionX

To extract the most performance from your RC vehicle, you need to know how to tune it to changing track conditions. The weather could be cold and windy – you need to change the setup to adjust for that. The next race it’s hot and the track is sticky – you need to make adjustments again.

So, how do you know what to do?

Well, you could just start randomly making changes and hope for the best. Or, you could ask you fellow racers, but then how do you really know if what they’re telling you is going to help?

That’s where a tuning guide comes in handy, like Dave Steven’s Essential RC Racer’s Guide books. There are 3 versions of this book – Offroad, Touring Car and 1/12th Scale – each offering a comprehensive guide to it’s particular racing class. All 3 give you an inside look at the Pros’ process – finding the fast line, how to approach setup changes, what changes to make and much more!

We received both the Touring Car and Offroad versions in hardcopy and sat down to take a gander. Needless to say, these books are absolutely invaluable if you’re even the slightest bit interested in learning to master your car.

What’s Included
If you’re buying the hardcopy of either book, you’re in for a real treat. The Touring Car version has 246 pages of amazing info – 70ish pages of setup info, 23 pages of advice on driving faster lines, 30 pages of case studies on both carpet and asphalt tracks and 14 pages of quick reference checklists! This includes input from top drivers such as 3x TC IFMAR World Champ Marc Rheinard, 9x European Champ Ronald Völker and 4x Australian National Champ Ryan Maker. And that’s just the TC version!

The Offroad version is very similar – 330-ish pages of info geared more towards offroad. However, this book has input from 2x IFMAR WC Bruno Coelho, 2WD IFMAR Champ Billy Easton and 4WD Australian Champ Ray Munday.

Needless to say, the info in both of these books isn’t just some random writings – it’s directly from the Pros, sharing the knowledge they’ve attained over the years.

Main Features
• Determine the fastest racing lines around a particular track
• Changing the setup of your car so it is easy to drive those lines quickly
• Practicing driving those lines
• Step-by-step guides
• Advice for every setup option
• Checklists
• Troubleshooting
• Case studies
• Quick reference material
• Pro tips from IFMAR world champions

Gallery

Final Thoughts
Both of these books are incredibly detailed and, depending on what classes you run, each definitely fulfills your need for knowledge.

We’ve been in the industry a LONG time and have raced (at a professional level) both TC and offroad and can say that there was info in both of these books that helped refresh our memory (and even had us thinking of better ways to approach things).

There may be a lot of tuning guides online (including our Tuning Guide), but none are as thorough and informative as these books.

Plus, you can take them with you to the track for quick and easy research. Well done!