Setting up the website has taken it’s time. With work, family life etc. there are only so many hours left in the week. I haven’t had much time to work on the actual project I wanted to do; develop a 1:10^th scale electric touring car! Now everything is more or less running and I have things a bit more figured out I want to start focusing on the actual car a bit more.

To get started off with things, I think I have to explain the goal of the project a bit more, and I have done some research which I will explain in a later post.

A question I can imagine many might have when reading this page is: ‘why develop another touring car? There’s already so many on the market!’

There are many on the market, but still there is not one touring car I look at and think, that’s it! So the biggest motivator for me is that at almost every available car at the moment there are things I think can be done different or better. Most cars have some items that are really well thought out and work great and I would like to put those good things from different cars together in one package with some other ideas to build my ideal car if that is possible. Maybe It’s not all that easy because one super feature on car A won’t work in conjunction with another great feature of car B, but we’ll see as I go along.

Team Losi JRX-S Type-R 

I currently own a Team Losi JRX-S. I mainly bought this car because I like the lay-out. It’s just about the only current touring car that’s got the motor and battery pack mounted on the centre line of the car to keep the heaviest parts close to the centre of gravity.  A downside of this is that the belts have to run next to the battery and therefore the differentials are very wide. This in turn, makes the suspension arms and drive shafts relatively short which is a disadvantage at many tracks. I would like to find a way to get around this in this project.

Another important point why I picked a touring car is that I think touring cars have a lot more development potential and design variation then many other classes. There are a lot more possible chassis lay-outs that will work as for instance in 2WD off-road. Many have been tried over the year, but there are still many options left to try. There are many different battery and drive-line placement options. If you change one of the two, some other things have to move so you always end up with a compromise. Now the trick is to find the optimum package (as always…).

On top of the design questions; touring car racing is a very popular racing class, so there are many races, many tracks to test on and a lot of competition which makes it an even bigger challenge. I could come up with a completely new type of car and I would be on top of the game, but where’s the fun in that?!