My 2023 FF – ARC R12FF TRF Blue

I already posted a couple of photos of this on Facebook a few days ago, and promised I would write a blog post on it when I have time, so here we are.

If you have followed this blog for the past few years, you will know that after my special made TRF FF, I have run first the ARC R11F, and for the past two summers the ARC R12FF.

I have been super happy with the ARC cars, and with no exciting new FF kits on the horizon for now (are you listening Tamiya??), I was faced with the question of what to run this year, as summer is luckily not that far away anymore. As I want to run a proper FF car, my conclusion was that there is still no better FF on the market than the R12FF, and since I have spare and option parts already and still feel there are many things I want to try on the car, I made the decision to keep running the R12FF.

After checking how much the parts I wanted to refresh the car would cost, and checking what a new kit costs (329 €), it was pretty easy to decide on getting a new kit. So what you see here is a brand new kit, with re-used option parts.

After two seasons of running the same car, I also had in mind that I wanted to do something special to it, to fool me into liking it even more 🙂

The big hope has for (too) many years now of course been a new Tamiya FF, but with Tamiya proving a even slower than usual in making this reality, the next best thing was to make the best FF at least look like a TRF kit!

Most of the alu parts have hence been re-anodised Tamiya blue, and I was mostly happy about the outcome. The only parts that are not perfect are the damper parts, since they are of a low grade aluminium.

The car is set up like I ended last season, so all the option parts used then are re-fitted onto this new kit. These include the low towers, ATS rear suspension, flex plate, ARC SRS servo, low friction diff, different rollbars etc.

I also use blue alu screws and turnbuckles from Tamiya.

On the ARC cars, the only part I have never really liked is the double joint driveshafts, as I always felt that they’re not precise or sturdy enough.

That’s why I during the winter checked if the Tamiya DCJ’s from the TRF420X would fit, and I was happy to see that they fit perfectly (of course needs to be proven on track). Therefore I upgraded the new R12FF with a set of these driveshafts as well

So far the money spent on re-anodising it Tamiya blue has been well worth it, as I now love the look of the car!

Overall a good way to inject even more motivation for the coming summer 🙂