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ARC R12FF Summer 2023 Report
Following my summary of the 2023 summer with the Tamiya TRF420X, it’s time for a report on what I have been up to with the ARC R12FF as well, just like I had done in 2021 and 2022.
I already did a mid-season update on the special TRF blue R12FF which I have been running this year, and if you read as far as the setup sheet below, you will see that not much has changed on the setup since the mid-season update.
That does not mean that I have not done any testing since though, as I squeezed in a lot of running in the second half of this summer, ending up with over 1800 laps.
The end-of-season running focused on testing springs and flex setups among other things, but I spent even more time experimenting with the ATS rear suspension, trying all sorts of setups. The setup I ended up liking the most is perhaps a bit special as I have it setup to slightly reduce toe-in during compression, but this setup worked really well on our local track.
The big progress with the R12FF came earlier in the summer with going to softer damping and springs, as well as adding more flex (upper deck screws removed), and then reducing droop slightly to control the movement of now more alive chassis. The late-season ATS testing also delivered a good step forward, while after testing different springs I still preferred the Axon HLS C2.1 front springs on the FF.
At this stage the car was delivering superb laptimes and also consistent and very fast 5 minute runs, but even more impressive was the balance and controllability of the chassis. Having run FF cars extensively and continously each year since 2010, I have never seen or experienced a car like my R12FF towards the end of the season this year. The car was on edge, but very controllable, just like any fast FWD race car should be. I had somehow managed to take the R12FF where I have always wanted to get with an FF, and I was super happy about that, as it was just pure joy driving it for the last month or so.
While this was the first season with this particular car kit, it was my third summer with the R12FF platform. Considering where I’m now at setup wise, something new for 2024 would probably not be a bad idea. Let’s see where we’re at when spring 2024 comes around!
And Tamiya, make that new FF already! 🙂
TRF Blue ARC R12FF – Mid Season Update
Since I’m really happy where I’m at with the ARC R12FF at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to write down the setup before I forget 🙂
And as I finally managed to do that, I can now also share it 🙂
Overall, the weather has been tricky for much of this summer so far, but I have still managed to make good progress with my TRF blue R12FF, and the setup has changed a bit from what I have run in 2021 and 2022.
Since I run the car without any ballast weight and with the Bittydesign CA45 body this summer, the overall weight is just 1150g. This obviously also changes a bit what’s required of the setup.
The way the setup has evolved so far is that I run the new Axon HLS C2.1 springs at the front, together with Axon’s SLS C2.7 springs at the rear, and significantly softer oil (350 instead of 450) in the dampers.
Following this I have reduced droop a bit both front and rear to gain a bit of responsiveness.
I also increased chassis flex by removing half of the upper deck screws. Obviously it is also possible to change chassis flex with the flex plate setup, but so far I have prefered the balance of keeping that as it is, and removing the upper deck screws.
With this setup the car is super easy to drive, consistent, creates lots of grip, but does not overheat the front tyres. In some conditions you can gain a bit of laptime by going up to C2.8 rear springs, but as a basic setting I prefer the C2.7 springs.
The new R12FF has worked really well overall, and the TRF blue anodising has worked as expected in making me like the car even more 🙂
Just like when my previous R12FF was new, I did half the summer without crashing once, which again says a lot about the car.
Finally then, here is the stup as of late July. I will do another update once the season is over.
Testing of TRF Blue ARC R12FF
The weather up here has finally allowed me to start testing my 2023 FF chassis – the special Tamiya blue ARC R12FF which I have written about previously.
As is quite normal, the early spring and summer is quite tricky with the weather either too cold and rainy, or way too and warm full of pollen and dust. The track could still do with a proper rinsing of heavy rain, but conditions are still ok for meningful testing.
I will update more at some later stage when I feel I have something to report, but the early running has seen me switch (as planned) from the Tamiya Scirocco to the Bittydesign CA45. As expected, even mounted for maximum realism, the CA45 performs really well, and with it I’m running the car at 1150g race ready weight, which is really noticeable. While the CA45 has some really beautiful details, still it’s no match for a Tamiya bady when it comes to realism when you watch the car on track, so we’ll see if I stick with it or return to Tamiya bodies. I just wish Tamiya would would make some newer proper TCR bodies now…
I have alreay made some improvements to the setup of the R12FF chassis as well, but I’ll return to those in some later post as I get further testing done.
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 🙂
ARC R12FF Summer 2022 Report
As the summer of 2022 would be the second year running the same ARC R12FF, I needed some new things to test to keep the motivation high. Before the season I refreshed the car, and got some option parts to try during this summer. Luckily this plan worked, and I have spent quite a bit of time at the track with the R12FF in June, July and August. Unfortunately, just like last year, August and September treated us with a lot of bad weather, which meant the season stopped earlier than I wished. I now have to finally accept that there will be no more chance to run it this year, so hence I write this report now.
The biggest change I did for this year was that I got fed up with the unrealistic blobs FWD bodies have become, and decided to run a Tamiya body again – the choice being the Tamiya VW Scirocco GT24-CNG Lightweight. Lightweight is of course relative, as this body all (heavily) painted with special wing mount, body protection etc. weigh around 115g. But that’s how it should be for this class imo anyway.
Obviously this raises the CoG, and the aerodynamic perforormance is not the same either, so of course the car is slower. To compensate I run the car without ballast weights this summer, which gave an overall weight of 1200g. Again, this is what I feel the weight limit of the FWD class should be, or 1150g if you are silly enough to allow 70g blobs 🙂 Either way, it’s imho frankly stupid to run around with 100g of unneccesary weight in the cars.
The change to the Scirocco body was an interesting one, as the difference to the Bittydesign HC-F I run previously was actually smaller than expected. The adjustable Protoform wing on it was also useful to tune it, and in the end I run the wing parallel to the ground. At the end of the summer I did the same laptimes and 5 min run times as I did at the end of last summer with the HC-F, which illustrates that yes I improved the car this summer, and yes the 50g lower weight helps, but also that a Tamiya body is not that slow.
This is how the car looks at the end of this season and how I run it. You can check the setup sheet at the end of this post.
The ORCA shhorty batteries were new for this season as well, and I have been very impressed by them.
As mentioned I tried quite a few options for the car this summer, and now I’ll summarise what I personally found with them.
As you can see from the pictures, I now run the ATS rear suspension. I did not have this last year, and it was one of the things I looked forward to trying this year. This quickly became my favourite update to the car, as it certainly improved the car and gave it the freeness it had always been missing. The setup options it gives are also very useful for an FWD. I tried to set it up in different ways, but ended up like you see, with the toe link mounted to the the bottom of the bulkhead and on top of the upright arm with a 2mm spacer.
Other upgrades tested that stayed on the car are the graphite arms front and rear, as these made the car more sharp but also consistent.
I also tested the front short arm kit and while the made the front end more reactive, overall I did not think they were worth keeping on the car as I felt they did not really fit the car well with the roll bar placement different etc.
I also tried the ARC R12.1 upgrade with the double upper arm turnbuckle setup on the car. Although not designed for the R12FF specifically, obviously the R12 and R12FF use the same suspension, rear bulkheads etc. so it made sense to test this upgrade on the R12FF as well. However, this test was not a success, and overall I felt it was sort of badly designed and not really a production ready concept and more of a prototype. I also did not feel that these parts improved the car in the conditions I run.
Finally, the Zero Play wheel hexes stayed on the car throughout the summer.
That was all the upgrades or different parts tested, now a closer look at the setup I ended up running.
The basis of the setup is the same as last year, but there are lots of small changes, with the biggest one obviously the ATS rear suspension.
I ended up running the same damper/spring setup, and also the 1M diff, as these felt like the best compromise for most conditions. I also tested softer and harder diffs, but for most conditions the 1M diff would be my choice.
Besides the improvements mentioned already from the ATS and graphite arms, another good one was to add 1mm wheel spacers at the rear. This really worked well on the track I’m running on. I also ended up running a bit more rear droop this year to get more weight transfer to the front, and I also run a lower rear roll centre. The rest of the changes are just slight adjustment here and there.
That’s about it for the 2022 adventures with the R12FF. Let’s see what I run next summer. If it’s still the R12FF, there are still more things to try to improve. Either way, I already look forward to that.
Click the setup for a PDF.
ARC R12FF – Summer 2022 Body Choice
Having run FWD bodies from other manufacturers than Tamiya for a few years now, I towards the end of last summer started to get fed up with the lack of realism of the bodies I had been running, and with the development of FWD bodies (predictively) going down a blind alley, I already then decided enough is enough. Hence I decided to take one step back for 2022 – and return to beautiful Tamiya realism. FWD as FWD should be. Can’t wait to hit the track again!
The Tamiya body is a 47357 Body Set VW Scirocco GT24-CNG Lightweight, with the wing from a Protoform Europa body. I use the Protoform wing because it’s a fully realistic 1/10 scale version of the wing size specified in the TCR regs.
The paint is a simple Tamiya spray can paint (PS3, PS4, PS27).
I’m especially happy with the spontaneously home-made wing mount! 🙂
Because of how narrow the rear roof is on the Scirocco body, and how wide the rear body mounts are on the ARC R12FF, I had no real option but to use the rear horizontal body posts.
Can’t really decide if I like black wheels more or not. Kinda the same problem I have on my real Scirocco… 🙂
ARC R12FF Rebuild for Summer 2022
As spring and summer will be arriving shortly, and no new interesting FF releases are in sight (although I would not be overly surprised to see a new Tamiya FF soon), I decided to get a few spares and options for the ARC R12FF which I run last summer.
As the parts arrived last week, I spent a few nights refreshing the car for the upcoming summer. I also finally cleaned up the wiring job on the car, and I’m finally also happy with this part of the R12FF.
Decided to try some ORCA low shorty batteries this year.
Replaced the top battery holders with the longer ones from the ARC R12.1 upgrade kit. I also used some Tamiya blue alu posts that better fit the height of the battery.
Close-up of the new electrics layout – with a Hobbywing capacitor making for a cleaner installation.
Horizontal rear body bosts – still not a favourite of mine, but due to ’22 body choice there was no other practical solution. More on the body later.
A few things to try this summer:
– “Graphite” arms
– Front short arms
– R12.1 upgrade suspension front and rear (don’t worry that the front parts are wrongly assembled – just done to hold them together until I run them)
– R12 Kevlar diff is mostly to have another diff, so I can try diff setup changes quickly at the track
ARC R12FF Late Summer Report
Following on from my mid summer report on the ARC R12FF, it’s now time to summarise all the findings of the 2021 summer season with the car.
Unfortunately it’s already October, and living in this climate that means no more outdoor testing. This year we were fairly unlucky with the weather conditions in both August and September, meaning that testing opportunities were more limited than one would have wished. I still managed to do a lot of testing with the R12FF after I wrote that mid summer report in Late July though, with the last session one week ago.
While the early summer testing was quite focused on trying different option parts and configurations of the car, during August and September I focused more on basic setup work and fine-tuning, and hence the setup I’m running has has changed slightly from the setup I posted in that mid summer report.
There are no huge changes though, as with many of the things I tried I ended up going back to what I had been running.
All the details are in the setup sheet posted at the end of this blog post, but besides making the front end narrower, most of the changes are small changes in roll centers, damper angles, bump steer etc. I also bought some thinner roll bars for the car, which I found worked well for me.
As I mentioned in the mid summer report, adding the flex plate gave the car some sharpness I had been missing until that point. I tested a lot of different settings with the flex plate, but always ended up going back to the same setup, as that gave the best feeling for me.
Making the front end slightly narrower really worked well for me.
I also played around with bump steer shims and found 2mm to give good corner speed but still with a good steering feel.
For the rear droop or downstop settings anything from 4.5 to 5.5 works well on our track, and it’s a very good way to fine-tune the feeling of the car. The best compromise for me in most conditions is 5mm.
It would still be interesting to try the short front arms on the car, and I would also like to try the graphite arms.
Having run the Bittydesign HC-F body for several seasons now, it would also be great if another modern body with enough realism was released in time for next season. One of the things I mentioned in my previous report on the car was the fact that in over half a summer of testing I had not once crashed with the car. Obviously I could not go the whole summer without crashes, but even so the HC-R body is still in very good shape! 🙂
After one full summer season with the R12FF I’m really happy with the car. It follows in the footsteps of the R11F, with both cars being huge positive surprises. I have not broken one single part on R12FF, and it has delivered impressive lap times and results. I can warmly recommend the car.
It remains to be seen if I will continue running the car next season, or if there will be something new and interesting released.
Survival mode on until next summer then!
Here a couple of decent late season runs.
And here the end of summer ’21 season setup. Click for PDF.
ARC R12FF Mid Summer Report
As some of you might have read, I very much praised the ARC R11F last summer. The R11F was ARC‘s first FF touring car, and a real success both in how it worked on track for an average user, and in the big race results it produced.
With the follow-up R12FF released early this year, I really looked forward to finding out if that would feel as good on track. Certainly the race results seen so far looks promising, as racing is slowly starting again in Europe.
I previosuly wrote down some initial thoughts after the first runs with the car, but now that I have had a lot more time with the car, I thought I would do a more comprehensive post on what I have found so far. I still have lots of things to test though, so this is very much a half-term report.
The one thing that I actually think describes the R12FF best is the fact that I have yet to have one single crash with the car – Yes, that beautiful Michael Clemente Motorsport inspired Bittydesign HC-F body is yet to be scratched!
While I know the test track well and usually don’t crash much when testing there, it has never happened before that I have done half a summer of testing with no crashes.
The R11F last summer was also super forgiving and confidence inspiring to drive, but this is taken yet further with the R12FF. At the same time, I have also slightly struggled to get the car sharp enough for me on that track which is very technical. It’s only when I added the optional flex plate that I got the sharpness that I wanted – but more about that later.
Despite that the car has sometimes felt too stable, it has still produced just as good laptimes and 5 minute run results as the R11F. I do however have a feeling that there is still even more speed in the car – just need to unlock it.
These I tested back-to-back multiple times, and while I did not see any improvement in laptimes or results, the car felt even more confidence inspiring with these used and the dampers mounted low on the arms. Since the results were not worse either, I have since left them on the car because I like the feeling they give.
As I already mentioned, the addition of this to the car made it sharper. The standard R12FF is quite flexy, and the standard upper deck very slim, so adding some stiffness seems to work well. I use the R129010 R12FF Flex Adjust Plate Set-Short Lipo Set (same as R128031 with hardware included). Of course, there are a lot of ways in which you can set this up, so you can keep experimenting forever. So far, the setup that I have liked most is one that stiffens the rear of the chassis (see setup sheet). This is staying on the car as well since it gives a lot of options to fine-tune the balance of the car.
One note is that before I added the flex plate, the fastest lap of each run would always be the first. However, with the flex plate (in various setups), the fastest lap is usually the third or fourth lap of a run.
Below you find my setup as of right now. The car feels very good now, and work really well, but please note though that many things are still to be tested, and I will post a follow-up at the end of the season.
Testing has been done in very varying track conditions – from 20 deg to 40+ deg track temps.
You find the PDF by clicking the setup.
As mentioned, there is still time to find in the setup of the car, so I very much look forward to more testing with the car.
I’m also tempted to try some of the available options like the R129012 R12FF Front Short Arm Set and R129004 R12 ATS System, but I will have to see if I invest in those or just work on the setup with the parts I have.
Here a couple of decent runs from my last test session.
Enjoy your summer ☀️
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