Originally Posted by andrewdoherty

Here's my story.

There are 4 drivers at my track that drive speedmerchant Rev 5's in 12th. The Rev 5 is great and I don't realy expect to ever want to get rid of it. We have all run races on the current layout within 3 seconds of each other. Two of these drivers have made the A or B main at a large race and we all can run a clean race for 8 minutes.

Several new-ish drivers have seen the competition we have in 1th and bought 12th scales. Weve had a few guys buy CRC's and one guy bought the R5 because of the price poiint. For reference when these drivers run sedan they are in our rookie class.

The R5 driver was having some difficulty with his car the toehr day and I was at the track just hanging out so I decided to take his car and work on it a bit for him to see if we could improve it.

Now I didn't build the car, but knowing the skill level of the driver taht did, I wouldn't hesitate to buy one based on the fit and finish. The CF was better machined than the Rev 5 IMHO, and in working on it I didn't find anything inherant in the design or quality that I would worry about. The shocks were smooth, the pod moved smoothly, the rear pod alligned the axle perfectly.

It turned out the driver needed a diff rebuild and had left off a shim when doing some maintenance. When I took the car out after getting it working properly again, I was able to consistantly run 11.8's and the car was stable. This was with his tires and batteries and radio. We typicaly run 11.0 fl on race day with our Rev's but I feel confident that with a tire change and a couple other small tweaks, the R5 would be right there.

there were a couple things I found irquesome, however theyn weren't related to fit and finish . . .

Both metric and standard fasterners were used on the car
Not all that BL motor friendly
some componenets are in a dificult to reach positions (like the side shock)

Lemme know if you have any questions Q. See you in two weeks!