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So....the Arrma Infraction

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Pretty much a Tamiya guy and love them for the scale and realism but this thing just grabbed me. It is everything the internet claims. What a beast of a car/truck. The 6s system in this thing is just crazy. It's by far the most powerful RC I've ever owned. If you are so inclined sell off some of your vintage stash and buy this thing. Be warned though that you better buy at least one extra set of tires because power corrupts!

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I just picked one up the other day.  Got offered a great price and couldn't resist, but worried it's going to blow through $60 of tires every time I have it out.  Glad to hear a good review though!

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14 minutes ago, tamiya3speed said:

I just picked one up the other day.  Got offered a great price and couldn't resist, but worried it's going to blow through $60 of tires every time I have it out.  Glad to hear a good review though!

I remember being blown away when I first saw one on YouTube. Heck if I’d had the cash I probably would have pre ordered one. But speed always comes at a price. How fast you want to go is only governed by the depth of your pocket,  be it a RC car, bicycle, 1:1 car, motorcycle, boat, etc etc

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They have one at my LHS, no doubt it's a cool toy, but I would rather have something that goes on and off-road.

I quite like the Losi Super Baja Rey, I just can't justify the $$$ at the moment.

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I have a stack of Traxxas brushless cars, and a few Vaterra. Never got around to the arrma vehicles, the metal chassis and unimaginative designs never really did anything for me.

I can tell you eventually you get over the 60-80km/h jumps and backflips and come back to the Tamiyas despite the fact the Tamiyas are overpriced and under equipt, often weak and flawed.

It doesn’t matter, all these high powered RTR’s don’t make me feel like a Tamiya does. I think however I love building and tinkering with my Tamiyas but if I want to bash I pickup a Traxxas or similar off my shelves. 

 

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Thinking on the flooded market of RTR’s, Traxxas and the like I feel they are built for one purpose and they are what they are out the box, and an of your head purchase decision. 

Where as your Tamiya’s are a blank canvas so to speak bought with your heart. I mean just Google Image search Sand Scorcher (to name but one) for instance, of the hundreds that come up there aren’t to many that look the same, people mostly put their own stamp on Tamiya models so it becomes something to be proud of. 

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i got one a few weeks back along with two sets of spare tires and wheels, haven't had the chance to run it yet.

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I actually like the look of the Infraction.  When I saw the first pics I was really impressed.  But then I don't want to own a truck that looks exactly the same as everybody else's, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised I didn't really want it.  I think as these cars get faster and faster it's no longer about having it because you want it, it becomes having it because you need to be faster than the kid across the street.  It's a sort of arms race that isn't really benefiting anybody besides the select few who are running stuff like this regularly in areas big enough to accommodate them.

A few years back, when Traxxas started releasing their RTR trucks with 6S-ready power systems, I was blown away by the performance and speed.  Actually, no, even before that, when the E-Maxx was brushed and only ran at 14.4v, I was blown away by the power and speed.  And the softly-sprung handling, the neutrality, the ruggedness and even (back then) the customer service on the rare days when something went wrong.  It did everything better than Tamiya ever could.

I finally got around to buying a used E-Maxx a couple of years ago.  A friend had had it from new, and it had the Castle Creations 6S power system in it.  I only ever ran it with 4S, and I realised that was enough for me.  I think I've run it twice since I've owned it.  Partly because it's too big to run at open bashes and partly because nobody local has anything I can bash with, but mostly because it doesn't really push any buttons.  It's all very impressive (less now than when it was new, admittedly) but it just leaves me a bit cold.  Mine is even personalised, with an old Parma body liberated from something else, but it doesn't tell a story like my Tamiyas.  It just goes fast.  That is literally all it does.

While Arrma are getting great reviews and lots of interest, I sadly feel they're at the cutting edge of the slow descent of RC into "how does it go, mistah?" and "can I see your licence, please?".  To (possibly mis)quote the sign from Mad Max: "Speed's just a question of money.  How fast do you want to go?"

That's not to take anything away from those who buy and enjoy them - I hope you have fun and play responsibly (we didn't have to say that when we had silvercans on 7.2V) - but I've stopped being impressed by it.  Maybe in the same way that the owners of old British motorcycles stopped being impressed by Japanese bikes that started on the button every morning, went around corners and had twice the power of their leaky old twin cylinder death traps.

Maybe I don't like them because every time I test-run one of my club-spec Tamiya cars up and down the access lane behind my house, some kid is probably laughing at me from the safety of his bedroom window and his grime MP3s because he's got an RTR 6S monster in his garage that once went 60mph on the path through the playing fields behind the primary school and hasn't seen a battery since.  Maybe because I think he's thinking "my car is better than yours because it's faster", and not "my car was engineered to go fast out of the box and all I ever did was plug in a battery and pull the trigger, but your car was carefully built from kit plans to specific club rules and has been tuned over time to be perfectly matched to the club track and rule book."  Maybe because I think he's thinking "My car will beat yours in a race around the block" but I'm thinking "Your car won't be eligible to race in the series that I take part in, and if we were to go head to head with the same car I'd wipe the floor with you" - at which point he'd probably show up and prove me totally wrong.  Because as soon as I start thinking jumped-up pompous things like that (and sometimes I do) what I really need is some yoof to come along and knock me down a peg or two.

 

;)

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I was debating between the infraction or limitless, went ahead and got the limitless, still on preoder, hopefully will get it before end of month, I bought on ebay the same 6s system used in the infraction, for 120 shipped, Theres still some avaliable,  Arrma 185 ESC and arrma 2050KV motor, they are selling them for halfprice, since I believe these were the motors/ESC  pulled out of the Arrma Nero's due to the lawsuit with traxxas, they are new just pulled out of the RTR models, so they are selling them on ebay cheap, same system in my Kraton 6s,  and that thing is plenty fast as is stock. So for the price I said why not get another setup like that and try it out in the Limitless, if anything I can keep it around as a spare, and only need a motor upgrade since the ESC is pretty strong to handle a bit more powerful motor, I think. 

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