Built to bash.
Tuned to race.

RWD. It is what the hobby and competition have settled on, and it is what you will see at every club night.

4WD touring conversions still drift, but the technique does not transfer. If RWD is where you will end up, start there and skip the detour.

If you want to drive this weekend, buy an RTR. If you want to understand the car, build a kit — and most drifters end up wanting that.

Building it once teaches you where every screw lives, which makes trackside repairs far less painful. Kits also tend to adjust further and take upgrades more cleanly.

On RWD, yes. The gyro applies countersteer faster than any thumb can, and every RWD car you see running well has one.

It is not a cheat or a training aid — it is a required part of the drivetrain, the same as a servo.

Start around the middle and adjust in 5–10% steps, one change at a time.

Too high and the car twitches and hunts down the straights. Too low and it will not catch the slide — the rear steps out and keeps going. Chasing the setting in small increments beats jumping to an extreme.

Match the tyre to the surface. Harder compounds slide more freely and last longer on abrasive concrete; softer ones give more bite on smooth carpet or polished floors.

Buy at least two sets. Tyres are the single biggest influence on how the car behaves, and swapping them is the fastest way to change the feel without touching a screw.

Smooth, sealed and clean. Polished concrete, sealed wood, vinyl and low-pile carpet all work.

Avoid rough tarmac and anything gritty — it shreds tyres and packs dirt into the bearings and drivetrain. A dusty floor also kills grip unpredictably, which makes the car impossible to read.

A sensored brushless system in the 10.5T to 13.5T range is the usual starting point for 1:10 drift — enough speed to hold angle, not so much that it snaps away from you.

Lower turn numbers mean more power and more heat. If the motor is too hot to hold after a run, gear down before you buy anything else.

A 2S LiPo (7.4V) is standard for 1:10 drift. A shorty pack keeps weight central, which most drift chassis are designed around.

Use a balance charger every time, and storage-charge packs between sessions rather than leaving them full. A pack left fully charged for weeks will not last the season.

Start neutral and change one thing at a time: a little rear toe-in for stability, mild negative camber front and rear, and ride height even corner to corner.

Write down what you change and what it did. A setup sheet you actually filled in is worth more than any recommendation from the internet, because it is about your car on your surface.

The car and electronics are the bulk of it, then a battery, a charger and a couple of sets of tyres.

The honest advice is to spend on the chassis and the gyro and go cheap on the shell. A well-sorted budget chassis beats an expensive one you cannot set up, and you will hit the shell into a wall in the first hour.

Driveshafts, a spare set of arms and knuckles, ball ends, a full screw set, shock oil and spare tyres.

Driveshafts and steering knuckles take the impact when you find a wall, and they are the parts that end a session if you do not have them. Everything else can usually wait until you are home.

Paint the inside, not the outside. Wash the shell, peel the protective film only from the inside, mask your window areas, then lay several light coats rather than one heavy one.

Use paint made for polycarbonate — ordinary model paint stays tacky and cracks the moment the shell flexes. Finish with a backing coat of white or silver to stop the colour going see-through.

Work through it in order rather than changing everything at once: weight distribution, then rear grip, then rear toe, then gyro gain.

The handling troubleshooter further up this page walks through the common symptoms and tells you which parts actually fix each one.

Order before 2pm on a working day and it goes out the same day. UK shipping is free over £60.

Unused items in their original packaging can go back within 30 days — electronics that have been soldered or run can only be returned if faulty.

For spares, use the finder on this page: pick your brand and model and it filters the warehouse to parts that fit. If it is not listed, ask us and we will source it.