Well my son (and I) ran the Stampede at half throttle on its first battery at home as we were told to run it in. That done, took it camping and changed it to full throttle. Holy cow, does it move. Chucking roster tails across the grass and leaves, kicked some serious dust on the dirt. Awesome fun. But he hit a hole and blew the top of a rear shock. Lost all the oil. Fixed it (minus oil) and told him to take it easy. I got chatting and next he is back saying he blew the top off a front shockie. Lost all the oil again. Oh well, that was the end of the fun for the weekend as it wasn't tracking very true with two opposing shockies with no oil. Got home and gave it a good inspection and found he had also busted a front suspension arm. Must have hit that hole pretty hard. I'm yet to find out how much for the parts to fix it but he's paying. Going to get a few free lawn mows me thinks 
plus he has now learnt a valuable lesson and will take it a bit easier on the rough stuff next time.
KB
I can sympathise with you there. I've always wanted a decent remote control car and a couple of years ago the wife made that dream come true and brought me a 1/8th nitro Hoboa Truggy for my bday. It wasn't a cheapy at $750. It was awesome, and I loved it, but everytime I used it something broke or wore out.
No problem though as the local hobby store stocked all the spares, and the replacement parts were reasonably cheap..... but. Everytime I went to replace the part the dude across the counter would say "look, I can sell you a stock plastic replacement part for $10, but you're only going to be back in here again next week replacing it again cause it will just break. I suggest you go for the upgraded part made from aluminium or carbon fibre....." It was always a great suggestion, but the upgraded part was always 5 - 6x more expensive than the stock replacement. On this basis it can be an expensive hobby when a simple hour or so of playing with the car costs $100 in broken parts every single time.
Just curious as to why most here are keen on electric cars? Do they perform better, cheaper, more reliable, than the gas cars?
I found with my nitro car that I spent half the time just trying to tune the thing. There was rarely a time where you could just grab it off the shelf, fire it up and play with it as mine always required lots of stuffing around to get it running right. It was fun at first and all part of the experience, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. My nitro car was also pretty loud, so whenever I used it in the street plenty of people came out to see what the racket was and I'm assuming from their facial expressions not all appreciated the sound of a nitro car as much as I did!
If I ever decide to go back to RC cars it will be electric for sure mainly because of the simplicity of the "plug and play" appeal.
