THE UNPROFESSIONALS: Your Ego is Not Your Amigo

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Tyler Hooks

0 July 5, 2018, 9:02 a.m.

By Tyler Hooks
LiveRC.com

The Unprofessionals is sporadic column of thought and opinion written by Tyler Hooks. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of LiveRC. 

I have problems with this myself so before anyone jumps out to call me a hypocrite, I’m going to work on it myself. Also I am not taking jabs or calling out anyone specifically just commenting on trends developing. My mom always said if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all. I love my mom but if we don't talk out issues and mistakes especially using the correct mediums, then we will never improve. 

There is normal joking and ribbing with your buddies, there are even some productive debates on politics or racing which is fine, but if you have a genuine problem with someone lets take a step back and keep it off of social media. Before social media back before I can remember, you had to either talk your problems out with someone, write them a letter, send them a smoke signal, send an email, a text, a call, or even IM them. The first instinct wasn’t to just jump on Facebook to call them out, and I think we should regress in a sense and get back to that.

Facebook specifically is a dark hole of opinions riddled with misdirection and confusion. Calling someone out in a social forum has major consequences to the overall truth. Ultimately there are normally three sides to every story - yours, mine, and the truth. Unfortunately on Facebook the one that most often gets pushed to the side is the truth, so the audience is creating their opinions without the full story or all the information. 

The most recent topic of debate or criticism has been track layouts, so here is my take and there are two sides to it. First off, as a race promotor and series manager I am calling out other race promotors and track builders to please pay attention when creating tracks, 40 foot booster jumps look super cool, but are extremely dangerous for marshals. Those type of jumps are really fun for about 15 minutes, but when you see a considerable amount of broken cars at the end of the weekend maybe it was taken too far. Ultimately toy cars can get expensive when you are blowing servos and bending chassis in practice.

Secondly, the RC community, please stop calling tracks boring. The most common thing to see in the chat room on Facebook or in forums is how boring the track layout looks. I think a good analogy is you could have a mild tame track where the field is separated by less than 10 seconds for 10 minutes, or you could have a rollercoaster of a track with Tessmann or Maifield or whoever winning by over a lap in 10 minutes. I personally would rather see close racing. 

Maybe I’m wrong and everyone does want these more extreme tracks, but I would expect to see more waiver forms come with them, and racers will have to anticipate larger weekend bills. I guess we as racers need to do our best to decide what we want collectively, and then promotors need to do their best to listen. 

Huge shoutout to anyone who takes time out of their life to work on a track or a series or a specific event. You will never be able to please everyone, but lets collectively do our best to entertain as many as possible, and to keep our dislikes to ourselves or those involved.