Now that's what I call no compromise racing car design; Xray introduces three different chassis for their 2008 models! Two chassis for Europe for rubber tire carpet racing, and a foam tire carpet chassis for the US. Each chassis is developed to excel in its specific use and be able to use the traction of the specific tires to the max. The european versions have been modified to take full advantage of the new 5-cell battery rule the EFRA introduced recently. You have the choice of either a 5-cell or 6-cell battery lay-out depending under which rules you are racing. The US version has a ‘normal’ 6-cell configuration.

XRAY T2 008 EU Rubber-Spec 5-Cell Edition

I first thought the new 5-cell battery rule was going to be introduced by the IFMAR as well, but this doesn’t seem to be the case in the near future. This really poses a design problem for many high performance touring cars I can imagine. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more cars coming to your local hobby shop in several different versions.

Since I'm in Europe and mainly do rubber tire carpet racing, I will opt for a 5-cell lay-out optimized for rubber tire carpet racing for the touring car development project, because this will probably be the norm in the future.

By the way, if you have some time, check out the XRay website . First of all it’s probably one of the nicest looking and most informative sites of all rc car manufacturers. Secondly it’s got a great explanation of just about every aspect of the car. Each feature is explained with graphs and pictures to show why they made it that way. It gives you some nice insights!

Team Magic just announced their E4 touring car. It's a belt driven top of the line racing machine with all the bells and whistles you can think of. It has some nice and innovative features, like suspension arms reinforced by aluminium tubes.

It looks a lot like the kind of chassis I have in mind for the touring car I'm developing at the moment (see the projects section). Centrally mounted in-line battery and motor and narrow diffs with long suspension arms.  

It is not out yet but will be coming soon. You can find all the specs and a lot of pictures at the Team Magic website . 

With the electric off-road worlds just finished, the next one is starting in a couple of weeks time at the other end of the world. From the 4th till the 14th of October the IFMAR 1:8th scale on-road gas world championships will be held in Cordoba, Argentina.

All information about the race is available on the official website. 

A clean sweep at the worlds this year for Team Associated by winning the 4WD class, after they took the 2WD title 3 days before. Jared Tebo is the new IFMAR 4WD electric off-road world champion 2007! And that with one broken foot and the other one swollen from a bug sting. Now that's keeping a cool head!

A very good result as well for Serpent with their prototype cars on their first ever outing at an off-road world championship, two cars in the A-final. And at the same time a bit surprising to see none of the Losi or Kyosho cars in the A-main.   

Here's the complete result: