Fighting buggy/Super champ differences

[RC_Maniac 14]

Could I recreate the Super champ from a Fighting Buggy re re with just a set of super champ decals? 
what are the differences? 

[Saito2 6686]

There's a lot of small differences. The original Super Champ benefited from hardened front suspension pins and stronger rear universals. Its sticks in my my mind that Tamiya improved the middle gear in the gearbox too on the Super Champ. The chassis plates were the old tan fiberglass/FRP. The electronics were different of course. Probably the biggest visual differences with the body on would be the rollbar/cage and rear suspension. The original rearward hoop of the cage was only zip tied to the main rollbar hoop whereas the Fighting Buggy uses much nicer pipe joints to connect the two. The Fighting Buggy has stops built into the rear shock pivot arms for down travel limiting. The Super Champ used zip ties to achieve this.

[futureworks 864]

I was looking at doing something along similar lines, in my case a ‘retro-rere’ using a fighting buggy kit but making changes to incorporate the original hump battery and mechanical speed controller from the super champ, so necessitating using the original mechanism deck (needed as it has a hole to allow the battery hump to protrude though; the fighting buggy one does not have a bit enough hole). Unfortunately the way the original mech deck and chassis plates were designed to fit together are different in many respects to the rere,  so I had to give up on that idea 😫.

[bRIBEGuy 3044]

If you print out the two manuals and go thru them, you will find that a LOT of the parts are different.  It's almost a different buggy designed to just look the same as a SuperChamp.  I went down this rabbit hole around a year ago when I picked up a reasonable SuperChamp in a lot buy, and figured it's be quick and easy to finish it up with rere bits.  Instead of a quick rebuild, it's been subjected to a year of neglect and finding parts to keep it more OG than just slapping on a bunch of fighting buggy bits.