Radio Controlled Cars - A Post Chiefly for Joseph

I was reading and answering emails from all of you yesterday afternoon when I heard the unmistakable sound of tiny, high rpm engines approaching the front of our house. I saw that one of them was just arriving at a point where I could see it through the 10" of space between the bottom of the Venetian blind and the sill. It spun out and sat fairly still, although its considerable horsepower caused it to wriggle in anticipation of its next stunning move.

I ran out onto the front lawn and saw a young man and a young boy, whom I assumed to be father and son, trying to get their RC cars to climb the curb. Then they ran them around for a while in mock races of only 10 or 15 yards. I shouted "I'm loving this!" The young man, responded, "Yeah. They're pretty fun!"

They were both delighted to find someone who wanted to know all about their hobby. It turned out that these were not electrically driven cars, nor were they driven by mixed oil and gas. They employed a piston engine which was pull started and ran on nitrous oxide. Anyway, I think that's what the young fellow said. It was pretty loud out there.

It turns out that the young man has just started dating the big sister of the boy. In early conversations, they discovered that they both owned the same type of super-fancy RC car. The man told me that they can run $600 - $700. He also told me that they run an actual 70 miles per hour! Much to the objection of my ears, he showed me how the tires stand up tall like those of dragsters when you hit the accelerator. The last picture I took was of the young man's car as it rocketed past me, left to right. Our camera is quite archaic for a digital model. Sometimes you can squeeze the trigger and the camera will think about it for a minute or two before it snaps the picture. It did that on this shot. I knew it was about to take the picture, because everything went black. But the car was already almost abreast of me and still the camera hadn't fired. Shooting habits kicked in. I simply led the target instinctively, hoping that it would still be in the frame when the camera clicked. When I began to see things through the camera again, I saw the car zipping out of the frame on the right. I was pretty sure that I had missed it by not leading enough. But the shot above is what I actually got.