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A bit of a recap before I start the current project thread: This is one of my two Traxxas cars - an E-Maxx Brushless edition that I bought used from a friend a few years ago (the other car being an E-Revo 1/16 VXL that I bought new with some bonus money a long while back and hasn't been use in years since I no longer have any batteries that fit). It came to me as a runner, but with some splits in the tyres, a bent shock shaft and a very tatty original body. I threw the original away and fitted a Parma El Camino that I've had floating around for years. Here's a pic from end of summer 2018 (if memory serves it was a pretty chilly day), when it was still reasonably new to me and my daughter was only 18 months old (and was still happy to sit in the workshop while I was tinkering instead of insisting we go inside and watch 3 entire series of Bitz & Bob back-to-back) The first time I drove the big maxx would probably have been in the summer of 2018. I fitted two 2S LiPo square packs (now long since puffed and disposed of) but didn't have any Traxxas connectors, so I had the banana plug flylead-to-Deans adaptors, then Deans-to-Traxxas adapters to hook into the ESC. Nobody had ever pointed out that this wasn't a good idea... I ran it in some local fields for 15 minutes before it suddenly jerked to a halt and flipped upside down. Clouds of smoke billowed out from inside and I feared my ageing LiPos had gone nuclear, and rushed over to get them out before they took my chassis up with them. On closer inspection the smoke had come from the ESC - it had got hot enough to melt the solder on the battery positive lead. I thought maybe this was the extent of the damage, but when I got it home I found all the caps had blown and the heat had damaged the main board. Resoldering the battery lead didn't fix it. Which was a shame, as it was a 6S-ready Mamba Max ESC and very expensive to replace. In the end I went with a Hobbywing, which IIRC is 6S ready although I have no intention of going that fast. It was a lot cheaper and fitted neatly in the chassis. Since then it's had very little use. The odd run here or there. Many of my packs are coming to the end of their useful life now and it's hard to justify burning through a pair of charged packs at once when I could get more than twice the runtime with my 2S cars. Also I don't often go anywhere where the E-Maxx can be run - it's not permitted on most of the open bash days, I can't run it in the garden, and I can't run it in the fields if it's busy. But recently I did find some places where it would really come into its own, so I decided I'd pull it down off the wall and give it a bit of a refresh. So - here it was on Sunday when I grabbed it off the wall.

Castle Monster X 25.2v ESC, 8A BEC W/1515-2200kV Sensored for a Savage XL Flux running 2S (x2) - what do you think?