Passing Whats Possible - Speed Trials

Speed is one of the bragable things in the R/C world, you hear ah well my r/c car can do 50mph or my rc car can go 60mph. When I've heard this said i've always asked how you know that? The response is usually fairly lame like, that's what it said on the box or in the manual. That's the first reason for this article, the second reason is when someone thought they'd comment on whether or not when we at TM claim a speed its gets questioned. We are not liars and below is all the antics we've been getting up to, trying to reach the fastest speeds with certain R/C's! I hope you'll enjoy reading though this page as we have put a great deal of effort into it and the time and effort to get out there and do these projects really is quite demanding!

When going for speed the logical choice is to choose electric. Nitro's just don't seem to be able to keep up with the lightweight lipo/brushless systems at the moment so for the really fast speeds we went with brushless. We did however manage fast speeds with nitro's as you'll see below!

Traxxas Rustler
When we first got hold of the rustler we never intended to go for high speeds but when we got bored of driving it, and we had watched many videos of other people reaching 60mph with them before we thought it would be fun to try and reach 60mph! This set the challenge then as we knew we would have to use Brushless, there is no other possible way to do it.

When we first started out the rustler we got hold of was stock completely apart from a metal idler gear. standard tires, gearing, shell. etc.

We went to Tesco's Massive Car park in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, UK to do the speed runs as when its closed the car park is very long and easily long enough to reach top speed with the rustler. The first 4-5 runs were down up the car park, reaching 42-46mph before flipping over backwards (rustlers are known to do this under high speed). We then went into Tesco just before it closed and bought some of the biggest cheap batteries we could lay our hands on and stuck them to the front of the truck. We were then reaching the 51-56mph speeds before the truck still flips over. Getting more and more annoyed I noticed the wind, the wind was not in our favor and if anything we'd been running the truck the wrong way down the parking lot. So we swapped over with the driver and took the gun and camera to the other end and sure enough on the 2nd attempt we registered 61mph on the gun. This put smiles on our faces and on the next attempt one of the tires blew off the rim and ripped so that put an end to the day. All this was covered in the TM-Rusty60 edited video, however we have put the original pieces of footage on this page for you all to have a look at.

On a number of times we tried to get it to go faster than 61mph on the setup we had. It seems we had reached the speed wall for us on this chassis so we moved onto something better.