Whilst Ty Tessmann impressively leads qualifying in 4WD with the HB D413, we caught up with it’s designer, Torrance Deguzman who shared a few titbits of information on the car that everyone wants to sneak a cheeky peak at… First off testing initially started back in April, however significant changes meant that the current prototype Ty is running was actually raced for the first time (run in a private test the day after) only at the Hot Rod Hobbies shootout a few weeks ago, we hear the car is planned for general release at the end of the year, perhaps with a World title behind it to boost potential sales? Hopefully we didn’t jinx it…

The suspension arms are carried over from the D413's overgrown cousin, 1/8 scale off road D812 with the carbon fiber stiffeners. The target is to be able to drive at 110% while not having to worry about breaking anything, which is often the case with 1/10 scale cars when driven on or past the limit. The car comes with metal diff gears.

If you look closely at the pictures you’ll notice 3 screws on each side (visible at the top of the side pods, by the Pro-Line & Much More stickers). This is actually due to the body being split into four separate pieces -  the nose, the cockpit or cab and the sidepods. Due to the undercut shape of the sidepods the body cannot be moulded as one piece as it would be impossible to remove it from the body mould – how long before we might see more of this on other cars and classes?

The undercut is a result of the chassis being narrower than the upper outer edges of the sidepods. That allows the chassis to be narrow which is great for corners as the chassis doesn’t bottom out, while the body is still wide which helps in the air when jumping.