Champion Genes – Hot Bodies D8T

Rear
The rear of the car is where most of the changes between the D8 buggy and D8T truggy take place. The chassis is way longer compared to the buggy leaving an empty space just behind the engine. This leads to a longer rear drive shaft (131mm on the truggy vs. 105mm on the buggy) and also a prolonged coupling that now is around 50 mm long compared to the stud type coupling found on the front gearbox.

At the first sight it look quite strange as you think the long coupling will add unwanted forces to the pinion bearings within the gearbox due to added weight and an enhanced leverage effect. Time will tell if it holds up as well as ‘usual’ solutions (read: short couplings) found on other trucks.

The rear end of the D8T is equipped with a 2.8 mm swaybar, #2000 differential oil and 3 degrees toe-in aluminium pivot plates. Just like up front the design of the pivot/suspension plates does away with the often fiddly E-clips fasteners for the suspension shafts but on the other hand you now have to take care of small shims, grub screws and button head screws. But to be frank fastening a screw is much easier than pressing an E-clip on with a set of needle nose pliers. Just make sure you make use of a good thread lock to avoid the screws coming loose under the ever present vibrations of the nitro engine.

The wishbones again are of the ‘closed’ design with no openings, wheelbase is adjustable via shims in front and behind the rear wheel hubs. The machined 4mm rear shock tower offers three different positions for the oil filled 107mm shocks and again the CW/CCW screws come into play to secure the shocks to the lower wishbones. Unfortunately the CCW screw had a ‘screwed-up’ thread so we had to replace the fastener with a normal thread item we found in our spare parts box.

The shocks come with an assortment of three different shock pistons with 1.2 mm, 1.3 mm and 1.4 mm holes. We used the smallest holes with #400 oil in the front and #500 oil up rear as recommended in the manual. Springs are medium-firm rated ‘white’ ones up front and ‘blue’ ones in the rear. In combination with the small holes and medium viscosity oil the set-up lead to quite neutral feeling truck on our ‘medium-bumpy’ test track with only some smaller jumps. The only thing we changed from the kit set-up was the added droop for the rear wishbones as we mounted the lower shock ball end in the inner hole of the wishbones instead of the middle hole as recommended in the manual. We think that especially the rear end of every buggy or truck need as much down travel as possible. The assembly of the rear most part of the D8T is completed with the addition of the large wing and its mount. The height as well as the position of the wing is adjustable to control grip and attitude of the truck.

Finish
To finish off the build we installed the tried and tested Team Orion CRF21 US Spec engine with Team Orion EFRA 3030 pipe and the oval air filter supplied with the D8T kit. Since there are no tyres supplied with the kit (beside some nice Hot Bodies LP rims) we opted to give the new LRP VTEC LP Truggy tyres a try. The low-slung D8T body was handed over to Vesa of V-Dezign for painting and as expected he did a great job.