Castrol Civic
Model Number: 58127

SubaruBrattJunkie

When I bought this car, I will admit it was by mistake. I misidentified it in the picture. I was hopping for a TA03F, but alas, it was not to be. A quick search will show that there are not many of these around, and most are nib's. This car is a combination of 01 and 02 attributes. It is front wheel drive. This makes handleing some what different, to say the least. There are a lot of hop-ups for this chassis, inspite of it's obscurity. Most are for the 02. I was going to put the FRP chassis on this with the FRP uprights, but they are different, so that entire set-up is going on a Prerunner. I put a 11 turn Venom motor and an ESC in this car along with some front and rear arms, and a dandy bottom cover. I ball raced it all the way through and will say it comes with a nice ball diff with the aluminum pressure plates. The man I bought it from said everything was in the box. I will get one some day that everything is. No instructions, no cockpit, about 1/3rd of the decals missing, on and on. He had painted the inside of the body silver, not that I don't like silver, but it is supposed to be green and white. He started to apply the stickers to the overspray mask, but stopped when, I guess, they didn't stick all that well. I peeled the ones that were there, the lights and the V-tec ones, but never did find the window stickers. Since he had left the mask on, I trimmed it around the windows and followed the bottom body line and put on the green. Next came the tricky part. I masked off the green and sprayed the white without disturbing the windows. This was a good trick as the body mask does not stay on that well. I put several coats of each color on, wetsanded it and cleared the entire thing, having to remask the windows twice. He had not stored the stickers flat, and they were coming off the sheet in one piece. I cut them apart and applied them as best I could. I had to glue down plenty of edges, and this is not the easiest sticker set to apply. Joost in the Netherlands sent me a cockpit for a JACCS Civic. It is the right one but is right hand drive instead of left. Oh well, better by a bunch than nothing and I owe him for the effort. A true club member all the way. The assembly was pretty straight forward with the only real challenge fitting up the aftermarket parts. The first time out, I ran the front tires off the rims in about 10 seconds. This was another little detail, he had painted one rim with some kind of metallic silver glitter paint that spent 2 weeks in brake fluid before it let go. I glued the tires and it goes like the dickens. It will never be a race contender, unless you were racing a group of them due to the handleing problems. It wants to spin, even in the straights and you really have to drive this car intently all the time or away she goes. I know why they didn't sell all that well, to wierd to drive. I do like the body and the art work on it, typical Tamiya. I was going to substitute an aftermarket body, but when I got it, I decided to save the real on as the details were not near as good. Would I buy another. No. Am I glad I have one, yes, but I am not all that fond of it. Good lesson in paying attention though.