About Shock & Servo

Why this site exists

There are two kinds of website about RC cars. The first is written by hobbyists for hobbyists — accurate, detailed, and impenetrable if you do not already know what a short-course truck is. The second ranks for the gift searches and is written by people with no RC knowledge at all, where the recommendations are whatever was highest on a retailer listing that week.

Shock & Servo is the missing third option: RC-literate content written for a non-hobbyist gift buyer. Correct on hobby grade versus toy grade, on brushless motors, on LiPo batteries and on parts availability — and never assuming you have heard of any of it.

That is why the site is organized by age and budget rather than by vehicle class. You know how old the person is and roughly what you want to spend. You do not know, yet, that a tall monster truck rolls over in corners or that most Traxxas models arrive without a battery. Those are our job.

Who writes it

Ryder M. is the hands-on owner behind Magoo Media Group, which publishes Shock & Servo. He researches and writes every pick on this site himself, with one goal: helping people who do not know the RC hobby buy a gift that still works in six months. How the picks are chosen is set out in full on the methodology page.

What we do not claim

This matters more than anything we do claim, so it is stated plainly rather than buried:

• We have not tested these products. There is no test track behind this site, no lab and no fleet of review samples. Every recommendation is research-based, and we will never write “in our testing” about something we have not tested.
• We publish no ratings, review counts or awards. The scores you see on roundups are our own editorial judgment of how well a product suits a particular buyer. They are never presented as review data, and they are deliberately kept out of the structured data search engines read.
• We print no prices. Prices move weekly and a stale number is worse than none, so every buy button goes to the live listing instead.
• We do not invent specifications. Where a figure appears — a speed, a run time, a battery requirement — it is quoted from the manufacturer’s own page and linked. Where a figure cannot be verified, it is left out rather than hedged.

How the site makes money

Shock & Servo is reader-supported. Links to products are affiliate links: if you buy through one we may earn a commission from Amazon, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It does not change which products we pick or the order we rank them in — the full rules are in our affiliate disclosure.

The publisher

Shock & Servo is published by Magoo Media Group.

Get in touch

If we have recommended something that is discontinued, described a product incorrectly, or missed a question you needed answered, tell us: contact@shockandservo.com, or use the contact form. Corrections are made quickly and noted on the page.