Inspire me! Rally cars

[Krustybus]

Long time lurker and passive participant in the RC hobby (spend more time browsing forums etc. at the moment as opposed to actual building/driving)

I've got a couple of cars in the shape of a Grasshopper, Blitzer Beetle and a Kyosho Beetle. The Kyosho needs a bit of work which I've been meaning to do for the past couple of years including painting up a new body set (which I've had for ages but can't decide on a colour lol).

Anyway, rather than get those kinds of jobs done, I fancied building something else but I can't decide what. I really fancy some kind of rally car as I've never had one and I really like the scale rally car bodies. Reckon I've got up to £250 for a kit. I love old VW's and owned a number of mk2 Golfs in the past so the Rally Golf (MF-01X) and the latest GTI (MB01) caught my eye and I also really love the Delta Integrale (available on the XV-01 or TT02 chassis). Not completely limited to these bodies, there's some other real nice body sets out there.

For occasional running and range of tuning options it seems like something TT02 based would be the best option but I've heard good things about the XV-01. From reading up it seems like the MB01 isn't up to much, not sure about the MF-01X. Would I just be best buying a chassis kit and adding the body of my choice? 

Need a bit of inspiration...or should I just get that Beetle stripped and rebuilt? 

[Nicadraus]

Here's a rally car thread that you might want to check. Has many infos about RC rally cars.

 

[skom25]

XV-01 is absolutely amazing. My favourite model. 

TCS require quite smooth surface to run them. Rally car is absolutely fine on asphalt and uneven pavement.

XV-01 handling is really cool. You can run it like TC or just slide. It does not require even too much power to do this.

However, XV-01 is bit old platform. Maybe it is worth to think about XV-02.

[Krustybus]

2 hours ago, Nicadraus said:

Here's a rally car thread that you might want to check. Has many infos about RC rally cars.

 

Excellent, thank you. I wish I'd done a search first 

[Starky_UK]

XV-01 is an awesome car. I raced mine with a KillerBody Subaru Impreza WRC 2007 body at my local buggy club and at a few local rallycross meets. It's got to be one of my favourites to drive. 

I also like to run a modified TT01e with a Skoda Fabia R5 body. This one has a one-way diff in the front and ball diff in the back, and is great fun for hooning around on loose surfaces. See the second video below about some of the rally mods. 

 

[chris.alex]

1. XM01 

2. XV02 

3. XV01 

[magnumb]

Generally, rally cars need to be 1/8 scale or bigger for me to really enjoy. Carima M48s Audi or HPI WR8 fall into that scale and the only one's worth considering for me.

I've had 1/10 and they lack or weight and size and made it difficult for me to really enjoy them.... I need to throw them around and get good weight transfer for scale realism. I've actually added xtra weight to my Carisma 

[Kowalski86]

5 hours ago, Krustybus said:

Need a bit of inspiration...or should I just get that Beetle stripped and rebuilt? 

I always try to finish my current projects before beginning new ones.

For a 1/10 rally car kit, I'd go with an XV-01, or drop a rally body onto a buggy. I did this to make an ORV baja bug that ran off-road better than most "proper" rally cars. The XV-01 is a more unique design than the standard shaft driven 4wd setup and a more interesting drive than the standard shaft-driven rally cars.

The TT-02 can work as a rally car, but they will strip screws easily if you hit an obstacle wrong, and you'll quickly reach XV01 prices trying to make it really work on anything more than dusty parking lots.

If by some chance Tamiya re-releases the TA02 with a lexan rally car shell, I'd recommend one of those. There's a lot of buggy DNA in the TA02 that leads to it having decent ground clearance.

Most M-chassis have wheels that are too small to really work on anything more than dusty asphalt, on top of the MF-01X having next to no battery protection.

I've also tried the "easy route" with a Traxxas Slash-based Rally, it was very capable but it liked to scoop up anything that it drove over, it's also hard on battery life/electronics. Other than the terrible progressive springs, it handled like a giant TT02/Fazer.

Avoid the Fazer 2 and the Apex2, both of them have a limited aftermarket and require comically expensive "rally kits".

[Krustybus]

5 minutes ago, Kowalski86 said:

I always try to finish my current projects before beginning new ones.

You're right, I guess I'm just after that new toy kick lol. Currently nursing a set of bruised ribs and various other knocks and scrapes from an MTB crash so looking at other avenues lol.

[Big Jon]

For a little inspiration, here’s an XV-01 in the air.

The XV-01 is brilliant.

[Juggular]

My personal Rally considerations in no particular order.  

[Serious tier: if you are racing]

1) Front motor 4x4 : XV-01  (Front : Rear weight = 59:41 )   

2) Front-biased Mid motor 4x4 : XV-02 (53:47)

[Less serious tier: if you don't care how fast you go from point A to B]

3) Mid motor 4x4 that can be either front-biased or rear-biased : XM-01 (also about 53:47 or 47:53 if rear biased.) 

4) Rear motor 4x4 : MF-01X

5) 2WD midship, FWD or RWD: MB-01.  

 

[You can check out the thread by @Juls1 below.]

My XV01 is still in the box, so I cannot comment on it. But you can see the reviews are very good.  If you ask me to describe MF-01F in 2 words, I'd say "funky fun."   If I must have a midship, XV-02 would perform better.  But I'm a sucker for funkiness, so I may go for the less stable XM-01. (The driving characteristic should be similar to XV-02, but somehow I expect it to be less professional.)   I built my MB-01 RWD. Haven't driven it yet. But I've heard that it drives better with FWD. 

A video on XM-01 vs MF-01X.  

 

[kevinb120]

Could just get a Fazer rally RTR Impreza, or the gorgeous 240Z.

[Wooders28]

Frewer rally body for the 1/10 Off Road chassis? 

Primarily they where originally advertised for the likes of the Boomerang-

 

 

I went for the RS200 and fitted it to a Schumacher K1 4wd race chassis 

 

Got the RS500 body for a boomer build too, but now my youngest has folded the Boomerang in half, it's been nudged down the list a bit...🤦‍♂️🤣

 

 

 

https://landlmodels.co.uk/collections/frewer-racing-235mm

[Krustybus]

Oh wow, that ad for Frewer bodies takes me back!! 

I actually had the RS200 body fitted to a Grasshopper. It looked ridiculous as the Hopper is so narrow lol. 

[Andreas W]

+1 for the XV-01 from me. The two I have are super predictable in their different environment. One for tarmac and one for loose surface and winter duties. The latter is a near stock LD spec only with metal NN4 parts, vertical servo mod and TG-10 axles rear with 9mm hexes. 

 

That said I like my XV-02 more and more the more I run it. It's more playful and easier to initiate slides. On the other hand It's less consistent while sliding around more open curves. It's best going around hairpins,  like you see in the vids of Dario. 

 

All 3 cars are second hand. Each of them costed less than a TT-02 with upgrades would cost. Actually the XV-02 was the cheapest of them, but that was a roller and the only electronics left in them from purchase is the Dualsky low profile servo that came with the winter XV-01. 

 

Edit: A couple of things worth mentioning in favour of the XV-02. Maintainence is far simpler. Diffs are taken out within minutes. It's also less prone to get stones jamming the rear drivecups and there is no place between the chassis and rear arms stones can get stuck,  like on the XV-01. 

 

Changing the pinion is on the other hand far simpler on the XV-01, not requiring hijacking a skillful kid to do the wrenching, because of smaller hands and better eyesight . 

[Pylon80]

Maybe I'll chime in with my experience on the XV-01, hopefully saving the OP from the disappointment I went through: while the quality of the kit and it's handling both on-road and off-road are absolutely incredible, that chassis did not work for me as it proved unable to cope with the small pebbles we have here in Arizona. The two issues are: 

1- The steering bell cranks (not the servo) get jammed by tiny pebbles. You have to turn off the ESC/radio and shake the car vigorously while trying to turn the steering by hand until the offending tiny pebble falls out. When that happens every 3min... It gets old really quick. 

2- The belt cover is open at the front and sucks in avidly the same little rocks; they jam themselves into the pulleys and you get the clack-clack-clack sounds announcing that you are chewing up the pulleys and belt. When that happens it's usually game over as you need to remove the belt cover and pry the pebble off the pulley. You could technically do that in the field in 10min or so 😅 but I usually go home in frustration when that happens.

Many people have enjoyed this chassis immensely over the years and I have come to the conclusion that they run theirs either on-road, on a clean off-road track, in fine dust only or perhaps in rocks too big to be a factor. In my case it just didn't work out 😕 There's one thing that the rocks have here that could be unusual: in the Sonoran desert the sun beats on the rocks terribly hard and they somehow become crumbly. For instance if you try to pry one out with a tool it'll break apart gradually until you basically obtain sand. That means you encounter every possible pebble size from fist size all the way down to sand particles. There always going to be one that is just the right size to jam something.

[skom25]

One thing about XV-01:

Maintenance is awful.

[Andreas W]

@Pylon80. It was sad reading about your bad experience in the other thread a while ago. Luckily I have no experience with pebbles getting into the belt drive, but from time to time the steering jams of course. Not so frequent as you describe, though. The bigger problem for me is pebbles jamming the rear drivecups and/or jamming between the rear arms and the chassis, making it handbrake turn to one side.  In the latest video from Dario you can see he had this as well.

 

The XV-02 has another shape there, so nothing gets stuck (as I have experienced so far).

 

I am curious about where you are heading now. I have checked the classifieds here and a 2nd hand Xray XB4 is not that costy, so with the Evo2 conversion kit from Tux I would end up more or less similar to a new, hopped up XV-02. Then everything is enclosed and should be pretty Arizona proof . 

[Krustybus]

I live in the green and pleasant lands of the UK so Arizona style dust/dirt isn't something we see very much of! 

Good point about maintenance etc though but I anticipate most running will be rough/broken tarmac. Gravel areas I guess may cause some annoying dirt ingress though.

Thanks for the input 🙂

 

[Pylon80]

5 hours ago, Andreas W said:

@Pylon80. It was sad reading about your bad experience in the other thread a while ago. Luckily I have no experience with pebbles getting into the belt drive, but from time to time the steering jams of course. Not so frequent as you describe, though. The bigger problem for me is pebbles jamming the rear drivecups and/or jamming between the rear arms and the chassis, making it handbrake turn to one side.  In the latest video from Dario you can see he had this as well.

 

The XV-02 has another shape there, so nothing gets stuck (as I have experienced so far).

 

I am curious about where you are heading now. I have checked the classifieds here and a 2nd hand Xray XB4 is not that costy, so with the Evo2 conversion kit from Tux I would end up more or less similar to a new, hopped up XV-02. Then everything is enclosed and should be pretty Arizona proof . 

At the rear, I was using XV-02 uprights from the first day so I never had any issues with jamming the drive cup 👍

Where am I headed? Well, stubborn as I am, I'm installing an EmbieRacing carbon chassis which will eliminate the steering bell cranks altogether. The belt will still be a problem but I'm hopeful I can reuse and seal the cover with... something. Most of the disappointment comes from having lusted after that chassis for years and having harbored the expectation that the XV-01 was a turn-key solution for a truly practical off-road chassis, which it's not 😔 You still have to tinker and try to seal things, just like I have been doing on my TT-02 rally. Also, as I wrote in the previous post, the XV-01 does drive amazingly which makes the whole affair all the more frustrating

[Kowalski86]

4 hours ago, Krustybus said:

I live in the green and pleasant lands of the UK so Arizona style dust/dirt isn't something we see very much of! 

Good point about maintenance etc though but I anticipate most running will be rough/broken tarmac. Gravel areas I guess may cause some annoying dirt ingress though.

Rough tarmac is perfect for rally cars, and closer to what real rally cars tackle. When I ran my rally cars more often I quit messing with gravel due to the amount of wear/maintenance that it required.

[Andreas W]

7 minutes ago, Pylon80 said:

 

Where am I headed? Well, stubborn as I am, I'm installing an EmbieRacing carbon chassis which will eliminate the steering bell cranks altogether. 

Hehe .  That's the way to go. Looking forward to see how it works in the vallbearing-like environment. 

[Pylon80]

I think there is a very good deal on an XV-02 in the trade or sale section of the forum these days @Krustybus 😳

[2qwik]

Hmm can't comment on the new stuff sorry, I'm STILL running a couple of TA02's.... And Loving it!!

[Rinskie]

On 5/23/2025 at 2:36 AM, Andreas W said:

Then everything is enclosed and should be pretty Arizona proof . 

Having lived and loved Arizona for a little over 4 years I can tell you without a doubt that NOTHING is Arizona proof!