LiveRC: Why, in your opinion, has mid-motor taken as long as it has to catch on here in the United States?

Paul: It’s hard to break the design inertia of the big manufacturers, especially when two of them are based in Los Angles. The big teams have 20+ years of testing and developing the same basic car, and they’ve enjoyed a lot of success with it. So even if a radical layout might eventually be faster, they continue to tweak and tune their existing designs because there’s a major race to win next month and time for testing and especially re-learning is short.

LiveRC: What is the advantage, in your opinion, to having a car that is built for mid-motor (like the X Factory) over a car that features rear and mid-motor configurations?

Paul: A car’s total design – not just chassis layout but suspension pivots, roll centers, shock mounting and angles, etc – should all work together as a cohesive package. Settings that work well for a mid-motor car I don’t think are ideal for a rear motor car, and vice versa. In my mind that makes it very hard to design a car that works well in both configurations – you either sacrifice a little in both configurations or design wholly for one arrangement and the other may as well be a gimmick. At X Factory we don’t believe in sitting on the fence – mid-motor is the fastest way around the track, so that’s what we do.