In this case it's not the driver...it's the durability of the car itself. Knowing how hard these factory drivers run their own car I doubt their gonna finish the race on a stock Prime 12 car....like I said before ,it's practically a beginner car...the material alone cannot withstand hard racing. I've inspected this car when it came out in 1996(this was when I was racing off road) in the Phillippines. I was in my local hobby shop and the shop owner ( a good friend of mine ) just received his first shipment of this car. This was when the RC10GT truck was big......Kyosho MP-5 just came out and Mugen had the Super Athlete buggy..... BMT was kicking Serpents butt....going back to the Mugen 12...I inspected it really well and found out that the car is made of softer plastic material than your ordinary race car.
Yes this factory drivers are gonna smoke people running with high performance r/c cars but still they won't finish the race. I've seen Barry B. run and he runs his cars hard......I doubt the Prime 12 will withstand that kind of punishment.
I have a lot of racers friends who were running HPI cars and this was when the Impulse came out 1998....this was also the time when Novarossi came out with this insane .12 engines. HPI racers(one of those is a pinoy friend of mine who won 2nd at an HPI challenge(expert class)here in CA) bought these Nova-based engines and ran their cars BUT they had to spend a lot more in beefing up the car to make the car handle that power. Another car that I used to run was the NTC3. Problem with it was the NTC3 the drivetrain.....it just cannot handle the power of new generation .12 multi port and modded engines like Richey's, M Speeds,and the others.