York Corner
Moseying around town at about noon on Sunday, looking for copy for this column, we spied some activity at the far end of Meadowbrook Plaza. There we found quite a few cars with out-of-state plates, lots of pickup trucks, and about three men, one of them selling hot dogs, milling about near one of the entrances next to what was once the supermarket there.
Inside we found a buzzing nest of RC race-car enthusiasts, and RC car races ongoing.
The "RC" stands for Radio (or Remote) Controlled, and we discovered that the site was the expanded home, complete with 144-foot-long oval racetrack, of Heath Jackson's shop Maximus, which caters to hobbyists with this interest.
We also discovered that, while Heath now stages races regularly there, and draws racers from all over New England, we'd stumbled on a special event, dubbed "S.O.S." for "September Oval Spectacular," spread out over two days.
Completely out of our element in this milieu, we sought somebody there who could give us (excuse the expression, please) a crash course in it. Heath couldn't oblige because he was way in the back of the facility, calling the races over a loudspeaker as they came up, but his wife, Chrissy, did what she could, then introduced us to some other folk who taught us a little more.
After about an hour, we left not much more expert than when we'd entered, and, indeed, somewhat confused about many details, but here's a brief summary of what we learned.
Allen Pierson, of Kittery, a senior at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover who works for Heath weekends at Maximus, showed us how each car in the races then being run had to be weighed and measured after each race: to qualify, none could weigh under 40 ounces (since lightness increases speed) nor could they be under 4.25 inches in height.
Jeremy Norris, a Saco general carpenter who's been pursuing this hobby for 13 years, tried, obligingly, to mix eating a luncheon hot dog with talking to us while using a Dremel tool to grind a slot in a brush from his car's electric motor. We watched as he also mini-soldered a wire to that motor while telling us that the cars' frames are made of graphite, their tie rods of titanium, and some screws of steel - and as he pointed out all the ways in which RC cars can be varied for peak performance: in caster and camber, in the stiffness or softness of front and rear springs, in the compositions of tires and more.
"There's so much you can adjust, it's kinda crazy," he laughed. He is, he said, "still learning."
That weekend, he reported, he'd spent 14 hours there the day before, where there'd been "a lot of practicing going on," and that morning he'd arrived back at 6:45 a.m.
Joe McMahon, may have taken the prize for having come from farthest away that weekend. A line mechanic for a garage-door manufacturer, he'd driven up on Saturday with his 16-year-old son, Joe-Joe, and three friends from Broadway, N.J.
His wife, he said, complains about the amount of money spent on the RC cars (it costs, we were told, between $500 and $700 to get one fully equipped), but he values the amount of time it gives him with his son, their only child.
The only woman racer there that day was 20-year-old Julie Brancato, from Branford, Conn., whom we found ensconced on a couch with a broken leg and ankle. She'd fallen off her motorcycle six weeks before, she said, and had another several months of recovery ahead of her. But she was there with her RC car - and with her boyfriend, father and boyfriend's stepfather, who were all also racing, and who were giving her a hand.
When she's not RC racing (and not laid up in a leg cast), Julie told us, she's a teller at People's Bank in Branford, and a student of design at Gateway Community College in New Haven.
Almost the only other woman we saw there was Kerri Land, from Dedham, Mass., with her boyfriend, Bill Smith, a postman from Leominster who works in Wilmington. Bill, we learned, was the racer, but not Kerri, who was using her time there to study psychology for a degree in radiology she's working toward at Mass Bay Community College. Somehow, she told us, she manages to work two jobs, too: one in a private medical office in Needham, and one at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.
Bill, however, has been into RC cars, he said, for 12 years, and coming to Heath's shop for perhaps four. The only other place there is to race is in Connecticut, he said, adding, "I like this place better."
When we asked why, he said that Heath "puts on a better show," is better organized, and runs a track "that makes my cars go faster."
Sweet music to Chrissy and Heath's ears.
Chrissy, we should add, is not only mother to their two daughters, Barrett, 6, a first-grader at Village Elementary School, and Chloe, 4, in pre-school, but works full-time as assistant director of stewardship for the UNH Foundation at the University of New Hampshire.
Altogether, lots of races going on…
