Losi Audi R8 6iX Project

I was sitting at Narita airport in Japan on a long layover watching YouTube videos when I first spotted the Audi in the background at RCX and I was immediately fascinated.  I pulled up some back issues of RC Car Action and found a review as well as a bunch of ads.  This 1/6 scale on-road monster was one of the first vehicles to use Spektrum's AVC (Active Vehicle Control) to stabilize the steering and moderate the throttle.  I wanted one.  Sadly, it was already out of production at the time I discovered it.  After some furious Internet searching I found one at a mail order company in Minnesota and ordered it from the airport.  The giant box was sitting on my front porch when I got home.

This is an 1/6 scale on-road supercar.  It is an RTR and comes with everything except the batteries.  This was my one hesitation in buying it (besides the price) because I much prefer to build a kit from scratch.  This model comes with a massive brushless motor the size of a soda can and can run on up to 6S LiPo with the included ESC.  It uses massive 1.5 mod steel gears, huge aluminum shocks, and sits on a 5mm thick aluminum chassis plate.  The tires are like glue.  The car is crazy fast.  In fact, it is pretty scary if you know anything about kinetic energy.  It is really made to run on a track, but I mostly drive it up and down my road.  Cracks in the road are enough to make it bottom out at speed, but it maintains a straight track due to the AVC.  Sparks fly when the aluminum hits the asphalt.

The model has been pretty good to me with two notable exceptions.  The stock tires are very grippy but only last a few runs.  These are high speed belted tires and the belts were showing within a week.  You can still buy tires even though they are out of production, but $140 for a week is pretty steep.  I found some online advice to change to GRP tires which also require hub adapters.  These work OK, but they are wider and don't look as good as the original.  The second issue is batteries.  I started with a pair of 5000 mAh 3S Traxxas batteries but the model puffed them on the first run.  It has some serious current demands.  I switched to some high dollar MaxAmps batteries which have been great, but they cost dearly.

The model has been surprisingly durable.  I slid into a curb at about 20 mph and destroyed the front splitter, but that seems to have been the only damage.  I managed to replace it and no one will be the wiser.  The batteries load from the bottom so you don't need to remove the body to change them which is a good thing because you have to remove 8 screws to take off the body.  Be very careful with the little grommets behind the screw heads because they fall out of the body into oblivion and you can't buy them separately.  I lost one the first day.

Since this model is out of production the only parts which are available are those already at retailers.  For this reason this is not a very practical car to run hard.  As of this writing parts are still reasonably easy to come by but that will end soon enough.

I ended up selling this car eventually due to lack of practicality.  Speed runs in front of the house are only fun for so long and I don't have a place to run this car the way it was made to be driven.