Project: Ultimate What The?

Modifications: Phase III... Brushless Dragster

In Phase II form, the poor What The? sat in the corner, ashamed, battling growing suicidal ideation. One day there came notice of an upcoming car show at which there was to be an R/C event with a miniature drag race competition as a side show. I was ready to enter the 4-Tec into the road course competition, but the drag race sounded quite interesting. I figured I'd just pop one of my big brushless motors from the Valkyrie in one of my smaller vehicles and let'er rip. Which vehicle, though? As I carefully examined the available lineup, the What The? shined for one reason: it had a super low center of gravity.

Now that is some scary stuff		Center of gravity at or below the axles!		100% pure business

I switched to some 2.2" Road Hawg onroad stadium truck tires to get more grip in the rear and brought out the original el cheapo touring car tires for the front. Determined to make the overall form factor of the car a bit more believable than it had been before, I got some Bandit rear a-arms and shortened the fronts with the Dremel. To stiffen up the suspension, I installed some Losi Street Weapon springs up front with ridiculous stacks of preload spacers, and put some nice, firm, purple DuraTrax Maximum ST progressive-rates on the rear. For oil, 70wt all around seemed to fit the bill.

What the?		Looked better without a body this time, methinks

I knew that a drag racing car with a completely loose gear diff wouldn't fare too well, so I got ahold of an old SRT ball diff and tightened it down as much as humanly possible to effectively give me a locked rear end. I installed the BL motor without a hitch and set it up with no slipper clutch, geared 25/78.

On its first test run, I found that the darn thing had so much torque, I literally could not get it to start moving from a standing start without burning some rubber. No, it didn't wheelie -- the center of gravity was much too low for that. After a bit of practice, I managed to start rolling it up to around 1/3rd throttle. At this point it was probably going 30-40mph. Blipping it up to 1/2 throttle caused the rear tires to break loose again, and the car would spin out of control... 360 degrees... 720 degrees... 1080 degrees... etc... to a calm halt.

I tried fitting slicks to it, staying with the sedan size up front and stadium truck size in the rear. Practicing on a professional banked oval track, I got it up to decent speed until I got cocky and tried to blip the throttle down the straightaway, up to about 3/4 throttle. I bent a shock shaft, popped a shock cap off, broke a turnbuckle, and tore the right front a-arm into three pieces.

Ok, next?

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