I'm not sure what to think yet.
There's some things that look awesome:
- Weight distribution options (battery and servo position)
- Motor mount setup with mid-motor option
- Central servo mount
- Control arms
- Omission of C-Hub, with bearings on the bottom
- Easy belt tension adjustment
- New gear diff
- Shocks mounted below arm centerline (but honestly, they could have done that with plastic)
- Rotated servo, with plenty of room for electronics
There's some things I'm disappointed to see carried over from the Mi4:
- Camber link plates, especially now that they've added the swaybar mount so I can't use the Mi4 ones I already have. The camber link plates are a pain in the butt, and it's expensive to buy different options. And as if it wasn't bad enough before, now there's a swaybar hanging off it. It seems like the swaybars, at least in the rear, could have been mounted lower, incorporated into the thing that retains the diffs. That way, they could have at least carried forward the Mi4 camber link plate unchanged.
- Slider inserts on the outdrives. They're not bad, exactly, but I'm not sure they were an improvement from blades, and it's harder to see when something's not quite right in there.
- O-Ring-retained wheel hexes. I think they allow more wheel wobble than clamp-on ones, especially as they wear.
There's some things that are interesting, but bring trade-offs with them, that may or may not work out well:
- The new steering looks trick, but it also looks heavy, isn't mounted particularly low, and the vertical balls on the steering mean no ackerman adjustability
- Fine-grained arm roll center adjustment at the cost of wheelbase, track width, and rear toe adjustment. Hopefully there's still a millimeter or two of wiggle room at the rear outer hinge pin for wheelbase. Track width can be done with wheel spacers. But rear toe... I guess we'll have to see how expensive options for that are.
- Optional rear outer camber link plates for fine-grained tuning at the outer hub, but at the cost of requiring more parts ($$) to have tuning options available.
- It looks like there's an awful lot of weight up high on the shock towers, due to the camber link plates, swaybars, and top deck mounting. That may work against the CG gains of moving the shocks down.
- There's a lot of new screws in the suspension, working against the weight savings of carbon arms and elimination of the C-Hub. 2 on each knuckle/hub and 2 on each arm = 16. Steel screws add up fast.
I think I will also miss the motor clamp. It gave so much range of adjustment for both front-rear distribution by messing with gear sizes, as well as left-right distribution to balance different battery and electronics weights. The only drawback was blocking some cooling holes on some motors, but I think it made up for that by working as a heat sink.
And things I'm just flat out disappointed with:
- The purple is gone
- Where'd the purple go?
- 404 purple not found
- Flushed and went purpling
- Flying purple sweeper eater.
Overall, the car is undeniably Schumacher, and I can't wait to see how it does in the next ETS round.
-Mike