The Backyard – One Week, Three Ways to Have Fun in RC
From high-end crawling to big-air bashing to small-scale monster trucking, the RC world is starting to hum again with new releases as we head into Fall! This is great to see, because after the blitz of new releases in Winter/Spring, it was a VERY dry Summer. Let’s take a look at some of the releases from the last week!
The Vanquish Products VS4-10 Phoenix Portal RTR got announced yesterday, and I wanted to lead with this. The truck, pictured above, comes in at $419 and boy-howdy, you are getting a lot of RTR rig for that price! Machined ring and pinion gears, the vaunted VFD transmission, portal axles with weights, upgraded shocks- this is good stuff. The cosmetics are also pretty sweet.
Earlier this year I purchased and built my first Vanquish rig, the H10 Optic, and it’s my current favorite crawler. The build quality is top notch and I’m excited to eventually add a VS4-10 to my fleet of trail trucks. I’m heavily considering this version of it. I’m sure it’s going to be really popular in hobby shops, especially at that price point!
The folks at Arrma announced the Arrma Quake 223S DSC 2WD RTR Brushless Monster Truck – The Quake 223S is Arrma’s newest 1/10-scale 2WD monster truck aimed at the basher crowd, and it’s powered by a brushless system that they are saying is capable of 35 + MPH on 2S and over 50 MPH on 3S. I have heard that these numbers are indeed legit from some who have the truck on-hand already.
It features Spektrum electronics with Dynamic Stability Control, a durable transmission, oil-filled shocks, and dBoots tires on tough wheels. Arrma positions it as a ready-to-run basher that still offers some control when you need it.
The cosmetics of this thing look absolutely killer IMO. It’s very much inspired by full size, solid axle monster trucks. At a price of $269, it’s probably going to find it’s way under the Christmas tree of many a hobbyist this year.
Lastly, the Losi 1/18 Mini LMT Zombie RC Monster Truck was announced late last week. The big thing here is that the body is a recreation of the 1:1 Zombie Monster Jam Truck, and given the complexity of the full size body, it’s pretty impressive to see it re-created in r/c form- complete with movable arms and “hair” hanging from the scalp!
This is a replica of the full-sized Zombie truck that’s driven by lifelong hardcore r/c monster truck enthusiast Bari Musawwir. Bari has done a lot for r/c monster trucks over the years, and it’s awesome that the Zombie truck he’s made famous has FINALLY been replicated in r/c form as a production model. One would assume that the full size LMT will get the Zombie treatment soon, though given how the body isn’t exactly a standard getup and is most likely a challenge to figure out how to manufacture in mass quantities, maybe it’ll stay in mini-form only. Regardless, it’s great to see Bari get his due!
It’s nice to see the release pipeline flowing again! The word on street is we are going to see a lot of stuff get announced over the next 6-8 weeks, and I’m here for it!
Alright, that’s it for me this week. Until next time, keep it on all 4’s!
