It is absolutely amazing how the RC cars handling and riving characteristics change when switching from All Wheel Drive to Front Wheel Drive or Rear Wheel Drive.

I did a Front Wheel drive test a while back, impressions and lap timing results are available here. Now I finally had the time and most importantly consistent track conditions to run the Tamiya Subaru in AWD and RWD on the same day back to back.

In order to change the rc car to rear wheel drive only I simply removed the front drive shafts as shown in the picture below.

Granted that this does not produce the optimum performance compared to removing the main drive shaft and therefore eliminating the friction drag considerably, however it is quick and easy and allows for the rc car to be converted back to All Wheel Drive in a matter of minutes.

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The Results:

Driving a Tamiya Subaru DF03-RA in rear wheel drive is a lot of fun -but challenging at the same time! Laptimes where 3 seconds slower compared to the All Wheel Drive configuration. Interestingly, the Front Wheel Drive configuration was only 2 seconds slower then the All Wheel Drive lap times.

All Wheel Drive

Fastest Lap | Avg Lap | Total

12.908 | 15.410 | 1.16
12.217 | 19.552 | 1.38
13.580 | 17.362 | 1.27
11.626 | 13.429 | 1.08
11.746 | 18.612 | 1.33
11.997 | 15.550 | 1.16
13.409 | 14.969 | 1.15
12.848 | 18.150 | 1.31
12.107 | 14.879 | 1.15
12.377 | 13.833 | 1.10
12.608 | 23.858 | 2.00
11.907 | 15.954 | 1.20
12.778 | 16.936 | 1.25
11.656 | 14.857 | 1.14

12.411 | 16.667 | 1:26 | Session Averages

Rear Wheel Drive

14.330 | 22.446 | 1.55
15.462 | 23.668 | 1.59
16.423 | 20.761 | 1.44
15.392 | 23.970 | 1.56
15.732 | 19.484 | 1.38
16.734 | 23.230 | 1.56
15.622 | 22.382 | 1.53
15.772 | 19.758 | 1.40
14.390 | 24.997 | 2.06
15.612 | 17.665 | 1.29

15.569 | 21.836 | 1:53 | Session Averages