So…….

The Tamiya 2wd gets it’s first MAJOR update in a long long time (I’m thinking The Goonies to The Goonies 2 long). It’s good to see Tamiya still caring about their off-road vehicles and still pushing hard to make their 2wd better. Rumors have it…this is all for the IFMAR Worlds Championship as it would mean a lot to a company like Tamiya to solidify their offroad prowess by winning their 1st ever WORLD TITLE.

The new chassis is +11mm and machined from aluminum much like the the TLR 22 and the Kyosho RB6. With the stretched chassis accompanies a new longer body with a slight cab forward design and rear fin for added rear end stability. I gotta say, looking at the pic below the body looks fantastic. Great job on the design and hopefully it functions as good as it looks! Also with the update kit comes a new battery brace, side pods and alum posts to mount the front end together. Whether or not you can mount a shorty pack sideways or run saddle packs is yet to be seen, but with a forward thinking company like Tamiya I’m sure they’ve done a lot of testing. Oh and it looks like the ESC goes up on top the battery brace for center mounted goodness. I’m also wondering if this chassis supports a mid motor kit? We’ll have to wait and see!

I’m sure most of you have noticed, there is a growing trend in stretched aluminum chassis that are slowly replacing the tried and true’d composite molded tub chassis. So far with my experience aluminum chassis cars are very touchy to track chancing conditions. If you’re good at tuning, aluminum chassis are great…but if you’re not, you might find yourself struggling and lost on what to do to get your car better. I’m really shocked at why there isn’t a company out there that makes a hybrid molded chassis with aluminum mini side pods in different shapes to control flex or a double decker chassis like the Cat2000. I guess X-factory Cubed is the closest thing, but that can’t go rear motor. *sigh*

Thanks to Area52 and neobuggy for the pics.