Fastest RC Car on Thingiverse

Last crawled date: 4 years, 3 months ago

Pretty soldering!
I would highly recommend you buy This Kit. I use it every time I solder and also in this project.
Don't believe the title?
Build one of these and race it against the car you think is the fastest. You might be surprised at what this car can do. I once exploded a wheel by giving it too much throttle on a high-speed run.
I built this car during summer and it was great fun. Designed to be easy and cheap to build with a total price of around 40-50 dollars (I think it was). With a cheap remote control probably 30 dollars more. All the mechanical parts (suspension, steering, drivetrain, and brakes) are finished but the car body is a work in progress. There is however a spoiler and wing you can mount. It has a customizable grid in the bottom of the center chassis where you can use zip ties to mount anything that fits. I mounted a speedometer on the front as you can see in the pictures.
Short description of characteristics
The car is fun to drive; more fun than the store-bought RC cars I have driven. The reason is that only the length of the road and your courage limits your speed, not the motors :) Handling is great at low speeds and the tires really grip. At higher speed the car tends to behave like an arrow and stabilize (due to design) which gives confidence. The downside is that the dampening of the suspension is pretty bad. To keep the car affordable I chose 3d printed friction dampening instead of using oil dampening. All in all the car works fine on asphalt and if you drive slowly you can do some off-roading. You should really avoid jumping though. The car is designed like a sports car, not a rally car. It is really good on flat tarmac but not on bumpy surfaces like grass or gravel.
If you want me to design oil dampening you could leave a comment and I will do it if I have time. Same goes for the car body.
Acceleration
The max power is around 300 Watts (100-150) and weight is around 600 grams. This makes the power to weight in bhp/kg around 0.6, comparable to a Bugatti Veyron. It is fairly fast for an RC car. Also, it is very high geared with makes it good for high speed instead of torque.
Speed
The highest recorded speed is around 40 mph (60 kph) but if you install FPV you could probably go much faster. The motors can theoretically take the car up to 180 kph (110mph), but air/wheel resistance would probably make for a practical max speed of 50mph (80kph).
Handling
The handling is very good and also customizable. Since the two motors are fixed individually to the front wheels, this enables for a very interesting feature. That is torque vectoring. By giving more power to the outside wheel in a turn, it can increase the turning force giving you more steering response! Also if you want less steering response and reduce oversteer you can give more power to the inside wheel. All of these settings are easy to do if you have a programmable RC remote. I used a programmable RC plane controller for mine and used the function "program mix" to adjust the amount and direction of torque vectoring. I also tried replacing the rear wheels with a skid to make a sled-like drift car (I have a video if you want).
Breaking
The motors act like brakes too and are mounted in the front wheels. Braking hard makes the car stabilize like an arrow, this is useful when racing or slowing down from high speed.