Tamiya TCS, 8/27/2005

Way late with this one but I’ve just gotten around to touching up the pictures. Sunday last at Phil’s behest I decided to head over to Tamiya America’s headquarters in Aliso Viejo to check out the TCS series. Very quick little RC cars that are quite fun to watch race. Tamiya’s facility there in South County is very nice and they have an excellent racing facility. The day was a little hot for my liking but there was plenty of bottled water and sodas on hand as well as hot dogs, chips and burgers. All at incredibly reasonable prices. Ran into Phil after about 30 min. of watching the GT qualifying rounds and we BS’d for a little while before he had to get back to the Tech tent. His duties for the day consisted of inspecting the entrants cars for rule conformity. The rules listed on the Tamiya site are longer than those I would expect from NASCAR. He was looking for parts violations, banned hop ups and such. I got to see a couple of GT races.. All of the early round Mini Cooper races and the ones I really wanted to see the open wheel F1 class races. With the open wheels I thought there would be a bigger potential for crashes but the drivers were so good and clean it was amazing. That was a really fun class to watch especially since I like the F1 and Indy car circuits in full scale.



Phil Green inspects an entrants chasis...

Had to hit the onsite company outlet store to escape the heat and looked over their showroom. The A/C was wonderful and they had quite the collection of toys in there.
RC and scale modeling stuff. This company has an outstanding reputation for their attention to detail. After perusing the store and getting my body temperature back to a normal level I headed back out for some of the F1 qualifying and grabbed another bottled water. Did I mention is was hot out there that day? This would make for interesting tire strategies on the cars as they were all running on the hot asphalt track. Click on any of the pictures for a larger image or visit the entire album by clicking HERE.

The Paddock and Pit area was unbelievable. I couldn't believe how many tools these guys had for their cars and how many tweaks were actually possible. The chasis and suspensions on the cars were very interesting and highly adjustable. Very close to the real thing in fact, just smaller.

Here's a shot of the Pit area followed by one of the snazzier paint schemes I spotted in the course of the day. Lots of wild colors on some of the GT class cars but every so often I'd spot one with an immaculate paint job and stickers.There was another one with a Nissan body that looked awesome with it's 3 color scheme and even the color of the wheels worked into the overall theme. With the right background I'll bet you couldn't tell it wasn't a full scale car.


Great day on the whole and sure beat sitting in my room sweating and surfing the net. I'd go back in a second. Those little cars can really scream around the road course and seeing all the gear the racers bring for tweaks was really something. One of my favorites was the little portable fans the fellas used. They would point them straight up and set their battery packs on them whilst charging hence cutting down on some of the heat. Great idea.

All in all a most entertaining event with the 3 class winners receiving expense paid trips to Japan for the worlds. Hard to beat that..

-Scott