- Mini Four Drive cars are a builder's race or a tuner's race. When the car is put onto the track, you don't have control.

- [Announcer] Go!

- Everything you need to do has to be known about the track before you work your car for whatever circumstance it's in. The best drivers are usually the most patient drivers. The confidence is always good but they always forget about the variables. Luck does play a part of it. You can be a master of these cars but something on this track can throw you off and make you lose a race. Your car might tech fine and practice fine but during a race, around one turn it'll suddenly lift off and you have no idea why it happened. went through a little spree where it died out for a few years but came back really hot.

- [Arthur] I started playing Mini Four-Wheel Drive back in the '90s. The tracks and the setups back then were a lot different from what they are now. After the hobby shops closed down, we ran out of places to race so the hobby died down. In 2012, when Tamiya brought the Japan Cup back, it started what we call "the third boom." Now, we're adults, we got the money to build, we got money to buy parts, and everyone flew back into it.

- Mini Four-Wheel Drive racing is a five-lane or a three-lane race. The technical aspect of it is it's all one lane. The one lane is one continuous lane that has a jump-over on one part of the track to make lane one be lane five. So every car is doing the same exact distance. The pricing of the Tamiya Mini cars ranges anywhere from $12 to $60, in reality, for really hardcore chassis kits. When you're competitive with the car, you can get a car that will have up to about $100 into it because of the carbon fiber materials that you might use or multiple motors. When we at Hobby Town have a race day, we do not let anybody see the track until the day of the races.

- Get set, go!

- When they do get there, we open up, and they're allowed to have their one or two hours of practice until the racing starts. They get no advantage before that. The races will have multiple competition levels. We race three classes, which we break into four classes. We have box stock, and out of the box stock we have two classes. We have full-range box stock and then we have a junior. Junior's only up to 12 years old. The car can only have a white bell motor to it, which has no name on it, and it has no upgrades whatsoever or modifications in the car.

- In box stock class, they don't want you modifying the car. It's almost like NASCAR. All the cars are supposed to be equal. The way you build the car is what determines the outcome. You make sure everything's aligned properly, the gears are set properly, you break the motor in.

- The tune class allows any Tamiya modifications that are out there, whether it's stays, rollers, weights, motor change but the motor change is limited to anything that says "tuned," untampered with. Any type of tuned motor is a motor that's limiting itself to a certain RPM from the factory but might have a couple more winds around the magnet. The more winds, or as we call it "turns," make a motor stronger. The final class would be the outlaw class. Outlaw, the only thing that we really have to worry about with the car, it has to fit into a tech box. The car's only allotted a certain size to them. [upbeat electronic music] There are seven main elements to the Tamiya Mini racing. You have the motor, the gearing, the tire size, the brake, the roller, and the type of battery. 

The Tamiya Mini cars use brushed motors. They can be broken-in different ways. Some people utilize water, dropping 'em in water with certain voltage, some people would use homemade oils. We can get a motor to get 20 to 30% more RPM just by doing a certain break-in procedure. Gearing is overlooked many times by a lot of people who get into it. There's three types of gears. There's high speed, torque, and standard midway. Depending on what you're doing for the track, you're gonna use any one of the three. Tire size changes because it's a gear ratio. You have the width of the tire, which of course creates less friction, the curve of the tire, and also the diameter of the tire. And then there's the brake. A brake is not a typical brake where you squeeze a trigger and it brakes the car, it's a friction point in the car, and if you have a flat car going up a curved hill, well, when the back of that car hits, you can adjust the length of that pad, and it'll tell you how much it's gonna hit, and slow the car down. 

Another part of the car is the battery. Batteries are made with different specs. Some are rechargeable, some are not. Rechargeable batteries have something called milliamps to 'em. Generally, the higher the milliamp, the more voltage that battery will carry. Now, a nickel-metal battery that is rechargeable will only be 1.25 volts but it will be faster than an alkaline battery that is 1.5 volts because it runs down to 1.25 volts. The battery will carry more voltage the more it's charged. And the final aspect of these cars is the roller. The roller is the mechanism that is a wheel sideways on the car so when the car is going around in its lane, this roller will help keep it in the track. The diameter gives rotational weight so sometimes bigger hurts you. The angle of the roller, if you find the car is riding up or pitching down, you have to fix that roller to where it's guiding the car around the turns to stay flat. So the rollers have a very big part to play. 

In front of me are four modified cars for racing. The first one right here to the left will be an MS Chassis. It's a mid-motor car where the motor's in the middle. It does have carbon fiber around it. It has the high speed rollers. The second car is going to be a Super 2 Chassis, and if you take a look between the two, the chassis do change somewhat on the bottom. It's a rear motor. It does have high rollers, much more stable for obstacle tracks. Notice the tire on it, how it's rounded to the middle. And then we get to the third car, which is an MS Chassis. This is a suspension car. It has a moving body, or a body dampener, so when it does come off hills and jumps, the car can land and crack down and stay flat, acts like a dampener. It also does have moveable suspension so if it goes around a curve, that's called a digital curve and it's very bouncy, this will absorb the shock, where the rear dampener can slide left-to-right to help coming out of some sharp turns as well for speed. The final car right here, this is more of a custom car. This car really isn't for competition, it's more for competition show. It's an AR Chassis converted to FM. The tires were cut. We have one pair of tires, the black, that will actually ride on the track and a hard rubber below it for absorption, and then the foam is only to cover the rim 'cause one of the technical aspects of this class is you cannot have a rim exposed. And those are four variations of racing. 

Today, we are going to unbox a typical MA Chassis car, one of the newer ones from Tamiya. It is the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, the Yaris WRC. And when we open it up, first thing you're going to see is the chassis. Then you're gonna see the body parts tree. Then we'll have the accessory tree or the additional body parts tree that go on the chassis. Wheels and tires. We are gonna have the gears, the contacts, all the little screws you may need for the rollers and the chassis, grease, very important, your axles, two of them, and then your motor. This is your typical white bell motor. The white bell motor, as you can tell, has a white housing, no decals anywhere around it, and you can tell by the pressure tabs that this motor is from the factory sealed. Generally, if a white bell motor has been tampered with, you will see these tabs have damage to 'em. This is a double-shafted motor for the MA Chassis. Some of the other motors just have a single shaft with nothing out of the back. So this is a double-shaft white bell. Inside the box, safety paper that just tells you all the safety precautions, the directions, which are very important, and then, finally, the decals. 

The amount of time put into a car just varies. I see people still working on their same car to this day. It almost never ends because you learn things. As far as building a car, you're gonna build a car generally in 45 minutes if you have all the tools prepared in front of you. [rhythmic percussive music] You cannot build one end-all be-all car that says, "Hey, I'm gonna win anywhere I go." It doesn't happen, it's impossible, virtually. Speed is one of those things that is a very loaded question in the Tamiya Mini universe. 

Just because your car's the fastest doesn't mean anything. You're not racing the other drivers, you are racing the track. So here we see two MA Chassis cars, the Yaris that we just built and the Abilista that is the same exact chassis, the MA Chassis, with a broken-in motor. Same motor, just with a break-in process. And you'll see the speed and what speed does in some situations. 

[pumping rock music] As you can tell, what the speed did in this situation, it made the car so fast that it's unstable and it was unable to recover over the jump. So here we're going to see the two same cars without a hill and where the speed actually becomes an asset. And as we see here, this is an MS Chassis car with an air dampener on it made so when it goes over the jump, it absorbs the air and lands flat. The outer lane on this race, you're gonna see the stock MA Chassis Gazoo car, in the second lane, you're gonna see the Super 2 Chassis, and then in the third lane, the middle lane, you're going to see the MS Chassis, which is the suspension car. When it comes to race day and the camaraderie with the Tamiya Mini, there are some competitive people out there. People who like to just be the best but the great thing is, the camaraderie of racers who all talk and get together with each other, they like to beat that person.

- [Arthur] It's generally like a friendly rivalry. They our crew, be your crew. It's nothing really too heavy.

- It's a different sense of gratification, different sense of creation. It's more or less a sense of, "Yeah, I'm gonna get them guys next week."

- Mini Four Wheel Drive racing has such a passion to it because people who get involved with it, they can do it in all age groups. It's not prejudiced to a five-year old or a 50-year old. You'll see grown men racing children. You'll see parents come in together, do it at the same time. It's a great way for multiple generations to get together, and it's inexpensive.