Tamiya 2WD Car Info

I initially purchased a Blitzer Beetle and Stadium Thunder to do some friendly racing and backyard bashing with. Here's what I found out.

Construction:

The two kits are identical except for some body posts and the grouping of the parts bags. The Stadium Thunder's bags are organized by what stage you're at in construction: bag A for the first 12 steps, bag B for the next, etc. The Beetle's are organized by type: small screws in one bag, washers in another bag. This makes it a lot easier to find parts when building the Stadium Thunder. Other than that, the hardest part about building these things is not losing stuff in the carpet. There are two things to be careful of:

Don't over lube the differentials. Put a little grease on one or two of the gears, and turn the diff by hand to distribute it. There's just enough grease in that little tube to complete the kit, and if you overdo it here you'll be cutting the tube open and scraping the remnants out to finish (as I did).
The steering servo screw will fall out. I replaced the machine screw that comes with the kit with a wood screw once it did, which it did on both kits. That'll pretty much make the servo useless for anything else, but you weren't planning on taking out a servo that you've bashed around in the dirt with and putting it in your $2,000 helicopter anyway, were you?

If you've built a Rough Rider or a Sand Scorcher you'll probably be surprised at how little has changed since those days.

Driving:

The rear engine makes it really easy to do neat tricks like skidding to spin the car backwards. Unfortunately, this mostly happens when you don't want it to. Just driving in a straight line or making a smooth turn when you're in loose dirt can be a challenge. It's great fun, but it's also unbelievably frustrating if you're driving against someone with a better setup.

The cars are fairly low to the ground, which makes them tough to flip over accidentally, even when making an abrupt turn on pavement. The drawback is that if the ground gets rough, the chassis bottoms out and the car skips across the ground, often turning in some random direction. No traction, no speed, no control.

Partially because of the low chassis, and partially due to the fact that they're 2WD, the cars tend to get stuck a lot. Getting high-centered on some grass when three wheels are making good contact with the ground is pretty lame. I had considered trying to pack the diff with grease or Vaseline to make it slip less, but never got around to it.

Final Thoughts:

If you've got a good mostly smooth dirt lot, or intend to drive mostly on pavement but want a car that you can jump off curbs with, these kits are fine. They also have the advantage of being pretty cheap and simple. Since they get tend to get stuck in tall grass, branches, or even deep leaves, though, they're just on the wrong side of toy for my taste.