TEST 1:
The first real run of the car was to be at a Batley indoor meeting, this being winter time. I turned up, a little late as usual, with the car set up as per kit instructions apart from the shock absorbers. These were set up as follows:

Front: AE Blue springs, smallest piston (AE #3 style), 35wt oil.

Rear: AE green springs, largest piston (AE #1 style), 25wt oil.

The first run was a little poor - on the polished surface the car felt ok, but on the higher traction carpet areas the suspension would collapse and the car felt really 'mushy'. I changed the rear oil to 30wt and swapped the rear springs for the slightly harder AE slivers.

My next run felt a lot better - still not quite there, but it felt a lot better. The cells I was using had a long link wire between the two packs, which was a little too long. The body was attached with the wire over the spur gear, and when landing off the large double, the wire became caught and took a few teeth off the spur! Disaster.

This was not a fault of the spur gear, just poor preparation and an accident. It did give a chance to test the ease of maintenance however. I didn't have a spare 96 tooth 501X spur gear, but Richard Isherwood who was also running his 501X told me about the 87 tooth B4 spur gear which is apparently what a lot of team drivers are running. I borrowed the 87t B4 spur from richard and set about replacing the broken kit item. Initially I thought this might be fairly easy to accomplish, but it soon came to my notice how things in the 501X are tied together. The layshaft looks like it should come straight up and out just by removing the plastic retainers from the centre bulkhead - but the front belt is also wrapped around one of the belt rollers, which makes removal next to impossible.

Richard Isherwoods TRF 501X @ Batley Buggy Club

In the end, I had to remove the front top deck totally, along with the front shock tower and upper link mount. Pulling the front differential up and out of the car enabled me to finally be able to remove the layshaft assembly.

The 87t B4 spur is a direct fit and gives a better ratio for brushed motors like I was running. Team drivers I am told are running around 17 (kit) pinion with the 87t spur. With the 96t kit spur they need to run a larger pinion (22, or there abouts). This is a one minute job, to replace the spur gear. It's just a shame that so much of the car needs disassembly to achieve it. Indeed, strong as the car may be, it's a shame that the top decks run all the way over the differentials and under the shocks towers - other wise it would be a lot easier to drop out the diffs.

Reassembly is fairly straight forward, the only problem is installing the front differential. What seemed fairly straight forward when building the car on a well lit work bench - suddenly became a bit of a nightmare to try and line up the barely visible little arrows on the eccentric housings. This ends up with you holding the car up to the light, screws and bits falling out as you try and set the diff position, one side at a time. I added some drama there, but you get the idea, I was against the clock also which didn't help matters.

A tip given to me here, is to put some white paint in the small arrows on the eccentric bearing sleeves, to make them more easily visible.

My final setup was:

Front: AE Blue springs, smallest piston (AE #3 style), 35wt oil.

Rear: AE Silver springs, largest piston (AE #1 style), 30wt oil. Outside on the wishbones.

The car felt very good with only a few small tweaks. Steering was pretty good and the car was easy to throw around the track. I suffered with the wrong tyre choice all day (the slightly unusual choice of Tamiya DF03 kit tyres), but the car was still good and performed well. The car flew well over the jumps and suspension soaked the bumps well. It is hard to describe an indoor batley track - but despite the fact it is indoors, it's always an OFF-ROAD track, and a challenge.

TEST 2:
I took the TRF 501X to the North East Indoor Regional at York on the 21st Janurary 2007. The event was the most popular regional I have ever seen with 120 drivers in attendance, split evenly beween 2wd and 4wd classes. The track was in a school hall and consisted of polished floor, carpet, mats, various jumps and table tops. A varied, bumpy, jumpy, low AND high-traction track.

In practice I ran the car exactly as it came off from the testing at Batley, but this time with the ubiquitous ‘Schumacher yellow mini pins’ – definitely the tyre of choice. The car felt good, like it had at Batley the previous week. However, I was persuaded to try the one-way for the first round - and I was glad I did.

Two other 501X cars were at the event - in the hands of Mike West and Richard Isherwood.

In the first half-lap before racing started, I realised what I'd been missing - the car was transformed from very good, to (excuse the Americanism) 'Awesome'. I managed 13th in round - for me this is good, trust me. For the second round I moved the shocks out to the second hole from the outside on the towers, front and rear. Stuart Wood was helping set up the car, and he said this would stop the car rolling quite so much and make it sharper. I had a true nightmare in this round, just poor driving to blame. Round three and I left the car as before - again another great run after a hesitant couple of laps at the start. Round four was the opposite with a couple of good laps at the end of terrifyingly bad run, spoilt by nerves.

Mike West and Richard Isherwood were at York, both driving their TRF 501X's. These guys are experienced with their Tamiyas - Richard being a former factory sponsored driver himself and later running the Tamiya Eurocup series in the UK. Richard made the A final with his car, running differentials front and rear.

I ended up qualifying 6th in the B final and raced well in the final to pick up another place. I had some poor luck and a few rolls from pushing (far) too hard - but the car was great. In the end I finished 15th overall on the day, out of 60 drivers in 4WD - a result I'm (very) pleased with, and one I can attribute to the cars fantastic performance. I can't state just how dialled this car was without sounding like a fanatic - It was great.