Kendogg,
The problem may be poor contact from the battery in your bitchar to the motor. When I fisrt installed mine, the same thing happened. Try pulling the motor out again and take a look at the back end of it. There is a little metal square contact that touches against the plate in the chassis. Try putting it at the bottom when you put it back into the chassis.
As for the range, that can be improved very easily. There's probably a crippler on your controller. There is a how-to on the net about it where it is and how to remove it, but I can't find it now. If you look into the clear part of the controller on the left side (by the little plastic loop), you'll see a long green capacitor with 4 stripes on it. If you see somthing connecting from that capacitor to another, smaller capacitor to the left of it, then you have a crippler. You just have to remove that connection and you should get at least another 5-7 feet out of it. Try to find the how-to on the web, it has pictures. Something else you can do is a simple mod that moves antenna to the front of the car, kind of like a real car's antenna. There's a mod out there for that too, real quick and simple and added another few feet to my range. Hope all this helps.
PS check out
this link for some pics and a link to the crippler capacitor mod, although ausmicro appears to be down right now.