Last post for today
In the evening I started cutting the body and its 12 little parts. Will be interesting to see how it will turn out.



Tomorrow then detail work, coloring and hundreds of sticker

I can't speak for others but in my experience running f103's and f103GT's over the years, the Ball mount set is the most pointless hop-up Tamiya ever made for a car - it essentially removes any side spring action from the T-bar which is why your friction damper can't control it. It might look good but the o-ring mount works much better. A common mod in the day was to solid mount the front screw and put 2x2mm screws through the mount to act as tweak screws

This hobby starts to be real work... I finished the body. It took full 12 hours. Sanding edges, washing, masking, spraying, putting on all 100 stickers and assemble everything. While this body could only be recommended for the experienced builder and needs full attention through all stages of the build, the result is stunning. Right now I would say, it is the best replica 1/10 scale RC body Tamiya ever made. The body height Tamiya recommends then makes clear, that it is intended to become a shelf queen and not to do laps with it (yeah it nearly touches the ground).









Then throughout the day my vintage topdeck arrived.



Of course I had to install it right after I finished the body. And the new look it gives the chassis is worth the money. Negative is the materials it is made of. Maybe on the pictures you can see that the edges look white. This is because a transparent vinyl seperates from a matte carbon layer that is laminated on a glassfiber plate Now after 12 or more years in the hobby shop, it shows its aging process. Still I love the look. I added some blue nuts and a carbon brace for the servo mounts. The chassis really transformed:






Tomorrow I will do some laps with my two beauties

This would be awesome! And I am pretty sure you will have a good chance of winning.
I say that, because my first outing with my F103GT was very encouraging

In the morning I did a quick change to the chassis. ShadowAus words in my mind about the ball mount set. I changed the front ball mount with the stock mount and secured the front end of the t-bar. So I got the side spring function back.





The first laps were interesting and it took a few minutes to adapt to the braking and cornering character of this car. Step by step I reduced the steering throw to stop the car from grip roll. This was mostly generated by the narrow stance with the 0mm offset Sorex 28 tires. For the next run I did widen the stance by 2.5mm hex spacing each wheel. Now the grip roll was eliminated and I could take more speed into and through the corners. Steering and cornering was very good today.
Most problems did I have entering a corner. The car had a tendency to suddenly do an ultrafast 180 turn on the spot. I couldn‘t fully observe it, but my guess would be that the rear inner tire lifted and like that lost grip suddenly.
What do you think?





My next steps will be:
1. Experiment with the t-bar: Change the rear ball mount to standard o-ring, Is the Option Part Flex t-bar a useful upgrade?
2. Height of the pod: The power pod has a 7mm ride height with Sorex tires and the 2 insert at the axle. How can I reduce the ride height further? The 2 insert is already the lowest possible insert...

I tried to hide the mentioned problems with an adapted driving rhythm and it worked very good. The overall speed was very impressive. I could manage a 12.2 lap and a lot of 12.3 laps throughout a run. For comparison: In the LMP class of the RCK series (where I participate with my TT02 KR) , the overall winner drove laptimes between 11.8 and 12.0 in the A-Finals with LiPo and LRP X20 21.5t. So this car is already blistering fast. And I drove old tires.
@Brinni: Go for it

Uuuuuuuuh... the alert reader has an advantage I had to look twice in the manual to recognize this part. I don’t really like having the motor high in the pod, but at least the battery is low now. Thanks for this observation

Some more parts arrived.



I finally found use for the upper carbon brace with receiving the standard GT bumper. Tamiyas design of the TS050 bumper is very unfortunate. The body posts are located with less distance to the arms. I would need to make new holes using the standard bumper with the TS050 body. And I don’t want to. So the standard bumper will remain in the box for later or as long as I use the Toyota body...



The rear experienced several changes. The one leftover brace of the ball mount set flew off the car and was replaced by the stock o-ring mount. This change already feels better suited for carpet. Then the black friction plates had to make space for the white low friction pads. I also added the thicker Tamiya friction damper grease. In the shop, I stumbled over the carbon shaft and couldn‘t resist. The gears were replaced by modul 0,4 ones as well as several steel screws with blue ones.



A last change concerns the topdeck. I removed the vinyl cover and sprayed some clearcoat to make it glossy. It now fits very got to all the other shiny carbon. After looking at the promo picture of the full optioned F103GT again, it looks like Tamiya sold the topdeck in a matte finish... Can anybody shed some light into this case?



So sad I have a race at the weekend. I would really like to find two more tenths

I finally managed to upload the video of my first day with the F103GT on the track ( https://indoor-racing-senden.de/ ).
You can easily see, that I had a hard time under braking and that setup work is needed. Well, the look is nice and with the torque tuned motor it is not slow at all.
In the video I am driving with my friends. One has a TT02S (white and grey PF Ford GT body) and the other one a M-07 concept (orange body). Just a typical day at my hometrack

One more thing that was mentioned/suggested to do to make the car more stable to drive, was to proper balance the pod.
In preparation I marked the middle axis on the pod. Then I put the chassis on needles.



First I wanted to hide the weight directly in front of the can on the pod plate, but that would have needed a lot more weights and space is limited there. I then decided for a solid brass block of 34g on the outside of the pod. I painted it black and put a Tamiya sticker on to make it look as if it belongs there (black box for cheating reasons ).