Team Orion recently released the CRF lightweight flywheel, which has been precision machined on the engine side to allow for quicker acceleration to out perform the competition. In it’s first official outing it was used by Joel Johnson to power the multi time World Champion to victory in the 2007 On-Road Nationals.
Source: Team Orion [teamorion.com]
We wrote a month ago that the new Kyosho X312T, the .12 motor based on the Team Orion CRF .12, would be made available in Europe on the 10th of July. Well its almost the end of July now, and although its 2 weeks late we have been told that the shipment of engines is now in Europe ready to be sold. The engine, when it was originally badged by Team Orion made quite a splash when it was released, and now that Kyosho has its name on it, and with the engine features some upgrades, expect to see it also making waves, especially when it makes its big time debut at next months European 1/10th Championships in Spain.
Source: Kyosho [kyosho.de]
Way back at the start of February Team Orion showed their CPD (constant pressure device) system to visitors at the Nuernberg toy fair, and we showed it to you for the first time then also. Well if you have been waiting to buy one ever since, you now can, as it has just been released.
The CRF CPD acting as a pressure valve system, effectively resolves this problem by regulating the amount of pressure going to the fuel tank. The valve allows a constant amount of pressure to be sent to the fuel tank, by opening or closing itself depending on the engine’s rotation speed.
Source: Team Orion [teamorion.com]
We have already shown you the outside of the new .21 CRF buggy engine from Team Orion, as driven at the Kyosho Masters by engine developer Adrien Bertin, and while it may seem overkill to keep going on about this engine, we feel its important to show you more. We now have photos of the internals of this new engine and at first glance they seem to look very similar to those used in the .12 engines from CRF. How good is this engine, well Bertin qualified his CRF powered Kyosho in 9th place in Elite buggy at the Masters, but without knowing the full details, its hard to judge the motor based on this performance. Look below for yourself at the new crankshaft and the piston liner set.
Click here to see the engine internals and video of Adrien in action… content
This weekend sees all the top Kyosho buggy racers from all around the World converge at the RC94 track near Paris for the 2007 Kyosho Masters. Our partners RC Mag are there all weekend covering the event and already they have spotted some points of interest including new parts for the Inferno buggy, that include the big bore shocks that have been seen before, but more interestingly the new .21 CRF buggy motor has been spotted in the Kyosho of Adrien Bertin. We have heard that Adrien will race the engine this weekend after some positive initial tests earlier in the week proved that it was ready for its debut.
UPDATE: Added lots more engine pictures.
Click here for a closeup… content
Following on from what we had heard earlier in the week, we can now confirm to you that the 2nd announcement to be made by Kyosho is that they have purchased Team Orion. From what we hear the deal means that the Japanese company now owns Team Orion Europe, Japan and USA, and we presume Peak Motors too, and that they also now own the CRF engine project. Our source in Japan also confirmed that they saw a group photo being taken which included Joel Johnson (head of Kyosho USA), Masayuki Suzuki (president of Kyosho) and Philippe Neidhart (former owner of Team Orion) which would suggest that all 3 will be involved in some way within the new companies. We hope to bring you the official release when we get it.
When we exclusively broke the news about the partnership between CRF and Kyosho, we mentioned that the official announcement would be made at the Shizuoka Hobby show, which begins tomorrow in Japan. We can inform you that this announcement should happen tomorrow, the first day of the show, and according to our sources we should expect an even bigger announcement coming from the Japanese company over the course of this weekends show. We have been told that this news is MAJOR and having heard certain fragments of this news, if they are true, we can tell you that this is indeed HUGE news.
We hope to bring you the official Kyosho / CRF announcement from the show and we will let you know when we hear more about the 2nd announcement, so stay tuned.
I think its safe to say now that the deal between CRF and Kyosho, that we exclusively revealed a week ago, is on. We have already shown you the first pictures of the CRF .12 engine that will be sold by Kyosho, and now in the build up to next weeks Shizuoka Hobby show in Japan, Kyosho have released official promotional photos of their V-One-RRR Evo which show the new engine mounted in the car (above). Also shown on the same page on the company’s website are some small pictures showing the crankshaft and liner of the new engine, which looks identical to the current Team Orion CRF motor.
View all the pictures here.
UPDATE: The new engine will be called the Kyosho X312T
Source: Kyosho [kyosho.com]
