Congratulations to HPI on turning out the same old product...

Hey, guess what?... the Gen 1 M18 is still better than your new Re-release!

What is going on here?.. Did someone buy HPI and just got the rights to turn on their product line again? And I heard RadioShack is re-releasing the Xmod as well (pretty sure they are made by HPI as well). Weird...

Anyways, my beef with the HPI is the belt drive, I have no idea how they can say it efficiently delivers power to the front. When we used to run 18th scale, you could always spot the HPI's because they were all slightly kicking to the one side down the straights. Un-even power distribution to the diffs always seemed to be an issue, even after a bunch of tuning.

I started into 18th with a bunch of cash spent on two HPI MSR4s (all kinds of hop-ups), when I finally gave in and got an M18 my laptimes dropped precipitously with the first few bone-stock runs. Wish I would've gotten the M18 first, I certainly woulda saved a bunch of green!

Maybe I'm still slightly bitter about it... can you tell?

And don't get me started on how many motors I fried up in the MRS4s!