The Lunch Box

The Tamiya Lunch Box is one of the most fun RC cars I've ever driven, it's got friction dampers and huge tires so it bounces up and down pretty much anything. If you punch the throttle from stand-still it will pull wheelies, if you do it from reverse it will flip over! :) I'm extremely happy that Tamiya decided to re-release it, this time with an electronic speed controller. Back in the day all my cars had mechanical ones and a lot of you will remember chasing after rogue RC cars that had theirs stuck in full throttle. No more! The bathtub chassis is very durable and the hugging nature of the body makes it pretty much dust free inside (unlike, say my Humvee, more on that car later). The gearbox is the exact same as it was back in the day and the same one found in The Hornet. Out of the box this car runs pretty good, but like many of the cheaper Tamiya kits it comes with plastic and metal bearings, which is cool for about ten minutes. VXB sells decent ball bearings for a good price and if you don't know how many ball bearings you need of each size they have a Tamiya section where you'll find what you need. I'll repeat what many others say, adding ball bearings is the best and cheapest thing you can do to improve your cars performance. I ran plastic bearings in my Lunch Box, Mini and Humvee for a short while, since then I've bought ball bearings before I build and I just throw the plastic ones right in the trash where they belong! The Lunch Box comes with the standard "silver can" 540 motor, which is pretty decent and I used it for a long time. As I got some more cars and upgraded those motors I ended up putting the "black can" Sport Tuned motor that comes with the F201 (Ferrari F1) in it. Which seems like a really good for it. Putting too powerful a motor in the Lunch Box will either flip it or constantly lift the front wheels off the ground making it very hard to drive. For videos of the mighty Lunch Box in action, just search youtube, I'll make some of my own soon.