What is the Race to 500? How did it start?

Pretty soon after Remzak’s record was broken and I had passed 450fps, the next goal became obvious—I had to push to 500fps. But this wouldn’t be easy and I wasn’t the only one with this goal. After news spread about the fps record changing hands, JordanManzan decided to give it a go and put an extremely high springload into one of his custom-made blasters. He reached an average of 410fps and became a serious competitor for the top spot. The two of us decided to make an official challenge to see who would be the first to crack 500, but we never thought it would become as big as it has.

How did it grow? Who else joined in?

Within a few weeks, other people had already shown interest in trying to challenge me and Jordan. Some like superstressed, potatofeeder, nerfaholic, and eventually Ian Whitehouse would try to mod existing blasters to hit 500, while even more would try and design purpose-built monsters to do the job. Included in this second group were people like Jordan, Stick, me, and later, Tinkershot. All of us had varying skill levels, ideas, and outside support, but we all wanted to reach the same goal.

Why do this?

500fps isn’t practical, and it isn’t allowed to be used at any community event. So why do this? For most of us, we just love the engineering challenge behind it. For others, we wanted to be the first to break new ground. Others still had nobler goals; to share the new technological breakthroughs in optimization and efficiency with the rest of the hobby. Most of us fell into all three of these groups.

While I can’t speak for everyone involved, I can share my opinion. I have a lot of passion for engineering and problem solving, and finding an outlet where I’ve been able to apply it and excel has been more exciting than any other project I’ve undertaken. I also think that advancements made in the process of reaching this goal can be used to improve blasters across the hobby, much like how F1 has improved modern car technology. Even though it operates on an entirely different level, many of the innovations made in racing have been adopted by the entire auto industry—be it the Armco barriers developed in the 60s that now line every highway and mountain road, or the ABS and traction control made to give racers an edge in the 80s and 90s, I hope the Race to 500 can have a similar effect on the world of mid-level hobby blasters.

What kind of innovations have been made so far?

Many of our early ‘discoveries’ consisted of us uncovering many of the tricks used by Chris Cartaya to improve the performance of his blasters. Radioactive was instrumental in exploring these ideas and helping to apply them to our current blasters. The earliest and perhaps most effective of these was the use of funneled rambases. These helped to greatly increase airflow, which was the most limiting factor to the top-level blasters and remains an issue that we haven’t entirely solved. Another very important invention was Breflon. One of Cartaya’s most well-known innovations was a process called ‘barrel waxing’, which would leave a thin PTFE film covering the inside of his barrels. Radioactive and I had the idea to cut out the middle man and just install Teflon lining directly into the barrel. AnJeCha was also very helpful in sourcing the materials used in making these barrels. Teflon barrels are still used today, and are preferred by a sizable margin of the fps hunting community.

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As of 10/29/2022 the Race to 500 has officially been won by Tinkershot with his custom blaster, the 557MachUp. As such, the Race to 557 has begun!

557fps is mach 0.5, or half the speed of sound and is the next major milestone for ultra-high fps blaster modding