Cristian Tabush started racing when he was about 8 years old. He remembers with a grin, and says "that Grasshopper/Hornet with a stick radio was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I was hooked from day one."
RC racing was Cristian's favorite thing to do, but having grown up in Guatemala City, it was not something he could do on a year round basis. He actually raced for only about 2 months out of the year, when he'd visit his father who lived in Houston, Texas. It was not until he turned 18, when he moved permanently to the United States to attend college, that he had the ability to race full time.
Racing came naturally to Cristian though, and his ability to absorb information from other people especially his father, Jorge Tabush, (who to this day Cristian swears "is the best set-up man that ever lived") gave him an edge over other competition.
At 16 after not having raced for over six months he qualified 5th place in the touring stock A-main at the 1998 ROAR Nationals with a worn out Kyosho TF-2. Cristian actually flew in for that race from Guatemala and finished a respectable 7th overall. Later on in 2000, Cristian and his father took a trip to the 2000 ROAR nationals in Jacksonville Florida, where Cristian managed to qualify 10th and finished 7th overall in the stock touring A-main, with a 3rd place finish in the 1st A-main, a 5th place in the second A-main and a DNF in the final A-main after working his way all the way up to 2nd place in the final main before his motor blew up. To this day, Cristian still claims that if he would have had 1 more day of practice, he could have won that national. Sure…
The next couple of years, Cristian dedicated himself to his education and only sparingly raced the occasional club race and Regional Championship. In 2001 he won the Region 9 On-road Championships, the weekend after his finals as well as the 2001 and 2002 Texas State championships in both Stock and Modified touring classes with little or no practice amongst the likes of Factory racers such as Ron Atomic and Brandon McNally.
A short while later, Cristian's local track shut-down and he retired from racing indefinitely. Early in 2005, Cristian’s friend Joe Chen convinced him to wake up early from his Saturday slumber to attend a Mini-Z race at the local club. After not having touched a transmitter in almost 2 years, Cristian TQ'd the modified class finishing second place and won the stock class after qualifying second with a box stock Mini-Z he had bought the day before.
Cristian was immediately addicted to Mini-Z's. The amount of traction the cars had, as well as the precision and realism of the cars really intrigued him. With Cristian's larger scale on-road background as well as the knowledge he had gathered through out the years, he was ready to push the envelope to a maximum. Every week he discovered something new about the cars and ways to make them quicker.
It all paid off later on that year at the 2005 PN Racing World Cup finals in Arcadia, California. After struggling the whole weekend with set-up, things finally came together for him in the final 2 A-mains in the stock class. Cristian proceeded to dominate the final 2 legs of the championship by lapping second place and running the fastest overall time of the weekend for any category.
About 11 months later in early October, Cristian joined the AtomicMods.com family. Rob wanted someone with tons of racing knowledge and experience to come on board and he thought, who better than the current Mini-Z World Champ?
At the 2006 Mini-Z World Cup, with new found confidence and full factory support from AtomicMods, Cristian dominated qualifying in every category he participated in. He ran the fastest laps, turned the fastest times overall but in the end wasn’t able to capitalize with any titles, as the bad luck trolls seemed to hang around him all weekend long.
Now more than ever, Cristian is driven to give good results for the team. With the recent addition of our test facilities, our head of R&D has more time to document and further develop improvements on the current set-ups and products AtomicMods.com offers. According to Cristian, this means: "More titles, definitely more titles. Either Jacob, Frank, or I will definitely win big this year at the World Cup in Portugal; that’s a guarantee."