I Saw something today that made me wish I had brought my camera with me to the track. One of the local guys, Roland Shao (hope I spelled that right, Roland) came out with something that really made me take notice. He took an old Diggity 1/12 chassis, put a two cell 7.4v LiPo in it, with a brushless 1/18 Mini-T motor in the pod and a Quark speed control (he had to fabricate a little adapter plate for the motor to fit, but it looked like an easy enough thing to make.) When he first showed it to me, it had the body on and it looked like your everyday normal 1/12 scale car. He handed it to me and said "that's ready to run", to which I replied "yeah, when you put a battery in it." That's when he turned it over and I could see what was going on.
My first reaction was that no way would it work well. The motor looked absolutely TINY in the pod (you could have fit three of them in there) and with the Diggity setup of the battery running longitudinally up the middle I expected it would simply be WAY too nose heavy to handle.
Then he did some laps. To make a long story short, it looked absolutely GREAT out there. Didn't put a stopwatch on it, but I'd bet money it would have been the class of the field against 19 turn cars, no doubt whatsoever it would have demolished the stock field. I drove it some, and I have to say it drove VERY well. Tire wear seemed a LOT less that we get now, I guess the reduced weight takes care of that, and the times I saw it test the integrity of the boards it took no damage at all (again, the lighter weight probably had something to do with it.
The only issue I could see was that it dumped after 6 minutes or so, but no one was driving to make run time... And this was with a 1500mah Lipo pack. And did I mention the thing was FAST with a capital F. I'd pretty much bet a paycheck that with a bit milder motor and a 2074 or 2200mah LiPo (which are pretty common among the TRex Heli guys) it would have made time easily and still given the 19 turn guys a hell of a run.
I'll be the first to admit that I tend to resist change, but seeing this car in action made a believer of me. Our track (360 Speedway) will run a class if 5 people show up. I'm going to prepare something to run, it just seemed like there was no downside to this... Faster, lighter, less tire wear, better crash survivability, and so on, and so on... Not that I'm ready to abandon 4 cell 1/12 scale... but I could DEFINITELY see myself running one of these as well. Heck, I'd want one if for no other reason than to have a super low maintenance practice car to run between race days.
I don't know if this is the future of 1/12 scale, but if it does go in this direction, I'm not in the least bit hesitant. If ANYONE would have told me yesterday I'd be saying this today I'd have told them they were outright crazy, but seeing IS believing.
Consider me a believer.