Here’s a car really worth checking out as it qualified 5th and finished 5th in the a-main at the 2013 Cactus Classic piloted by Lee Martin. The Tamiya TRF201 MM looks like an excellent build with a carbon fiber main chassis and upper brace that doubles as a batter strap. For protection and longevity, the chassis is guarded with a b44 like lexan under-tray **(Correction, not an under-tray as stated by GAYO below)**. Since the Schumacher Storm and Cougar 2000 days, I’ve been patiently waiting for a carbon fiber 2wd for a long time now and it’s finally back and on a terror in the TRF201 MM. There’s just something magical about the way carbon fiber looks on RC cars. I just hope Tamiya decides to stay with carbon fiber and not move to the industry mainstream 7075 aluminum chassis found on the TLR 22, Kyosho RB6, Durango DEX210, and Proken S1.

I’m not sure if the mid motor craze is going to be suited for everyone since it requires a few things in its favor for mid motor to really out pace the rear motor configuration and that is traction and track smoothness. But now that it is here and being dialed in by the world’s best, watch for mid motor to really make an impact on the 2wd offroad scene all over the world and not just in Europe.

So it seems that the most popular battery configuration for MM are saddle packs since it was used by everyone in the A-main at the Cactus this year that ran a MM car. Since shorty packs have been the big rage as of late, it looks like saddles might get a bump in sales b/c of what happened at the Cactus. It will be interesting to see if anyone decides to use a shorty pack with added weight much like Hara used at the Reedy, but use the pack vertically mounted instead of horizontally mounted.

Lee went with saddle packs all the way back with his ESC mounted forward behind the servo. Also notice this he opted to run a low profile servo to save weight and space in order to chassis mount all his electronics. It also looks like Lee is running Team Associated big bore shocks on his TRF as well since Tamiya has yet to release big bores for the TRF line.

I want to thank RedRC for their fantastic coverage of this race event all week long from the start of practice to the very end. Their coverage is awesome and please visit their site for more info and pics. RedRC!