The biggest change I did for this year was that I got fed up with the unrealistic blobs FWD bodies have become, and decided to run a Tamiya body again – the choice being the Tamiya VW Scirocco GT24-CNG Lightweight. Lightweight is of course relative, as this body all (heavily) painted with special wing mount, body protection etc. weigh around 115g. But that’s how it should be for this class imo anyway.

Obviously this raises the CoG, and the aerodynamic perforormance is not the same either, so of course the car is slower. To compensate I run the car without ballast weights this summer, which gave an overall weight of 1200g. Again, this is what I feel the weight limit of the FWD class should be, or 1150g if you are silly enough to allow 70g blobs 🙂. Either way, it’s imho frankly stupid to run around with 100g of unneccesary weight in the cars.

The change to the Scirocco body was an interesting one, as the difference to the Bittydesign HC-F I run previously was actually smaller than expected. The adjustable Protoform wing on it was also useful to tune it, and in the end I run the wing parallel to the ground. At the end of the summer I did the same laptimes and 5 min run times as I did at the end of last summer with the HC-F, which illustrates that yes I improved the car this summer, and yes the 50g lower weight helps, but also that a Tamiya body is not that slow.

This is how the car looks at the end of this season and how I run it. You can check the setup sheet at the end of this post.

The ORCA shhorty batteries were new for this season as well, and I have been very impressed by them.

As mentioned I tried quite a few options for the car this summer, and now I’ll summarise what I personally found with them.

As you can see from the pictures, I now run the ATS rear suspension. I did not have this last year, and it was one of the things I looked forward to trying this year. This quickly became my favourite update to the car, as it certainly improved the car and gave it the freeness it had always been missing. The setup options it gives are also very useful for an FWD. I tried to set it up in different ways, but ended up like you see, with the toe link mounted to the the bottom of the bulkhead and on top of the upright arm with a 2mm spacer.

Other upgrades tested that stayed on the car are the graphite arms front and rear, as these made the car more sharp but also consistent.

I also tested the front short arm kit and while the made the front end more reactive, overall I did not think they were worth keeping on the car as I felt they did not really fit the car well with the roll bar placement different etc.

I also tried the ARC R12.1 upgrade with the double upper arm turnbuckle setup on the car. Although not designed for the R12FF specifically, obviously the R12 and R12FF use the same suspension, rear bulkheads etc. so it made sense to test this upgrade on the R12FF as well. However, this test was not a success, and overall I felt it was sort of badly designed and not really a production ready concept and more of a prototype. I also did not feel that these parts improved the car in the conditions I run.

Finally, the Zero Play wheel hexes stayed on the car throughout the summer.

That was all the upgrades or different parts tested, now a closer look at the setup I ended up running.

The basis of the setup is the same as last year, but there are lots of small changes, with the biggest one obviously the ATS rear suspension.

I ended up running the same damper/spring setup, and also the 1M diff, as these felt like the best compromise for most conditions. I also tested softer and harder diffs, but for most conditions the 1M diff would be my choice.

Besides the improvements mentioned already from the ATS and graphite arms, another good one was to add 1mm wheel spacers at the rear. This really worked well on the track I’m running on. I also ended up running a bit more rear droop this year to get more weight transfer to the front, and I also run a lower rear roll centre. The rest of the changes are just slight adjustment here and there.

That’s about it for the 2022 adventures with the R12FF. Let’s see what I run next summer. If it’s still the R12FF, there are still more things to try to improve. Either way, I already look forward to that.