Mini 4WD is an electrifying race series for makers and tinkerers

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We’re going to try something a little different this morning. Partially in response to several requests for more maker-focused videos and partially because my executive producer is head-over-heels in love with Pocket Circuit racing in Yakuza 0, we’re bringing you the first in what we hope to make into a series called “Mini Motors,” and it’s all about tiny cars going really fast.

RC racing in all its various forms has always been a maker-y kind of hobby, and Mini 4WD serves as an excellent genre example to start with. You take a 1:30-scale battery-powered car, spend days carefully and patiently tuning the crap out of it, and then you set it loose on a curving track as fast as its little wheels can make it go—up to 40 miles per hour (about 65km/h). The Mini 4WD that wins does so by a mixture of careful planning, careful engineering, and a big heaping of pure luck.

Must go faster

For this video, we spent time talking Mini 4WD with Randy Holt, owner of the HobbyTown store in Toms River, New Jersey. The biggest factor that sets Mini 4WD apart from other RC cars is that Mini 4WD cars are hands-off during the race—once the green flag waves, the cars are on their own. They zip around the track, steered by the cars’ built-in bumpers and rollers pushing against the track walls. Though the track appears to have multiple lanes in parallel, it’s actually a single lane that spirals around the circuit, connected by a jump-over. This ensures that all the Mini 4WDs on the track are all racing the same total distance (because otherwise the inner lanes would be shorter than the outer lanes).

Holt gives us a nice overview of Mini 4WD cars, the different race classes, and a bit of a primer on tuning and engineering. The big takeaway is that the sport is friendly to newcomers and easy to get into—you can spend $15 or so on the Tamiya Yaris shown in the video, which can be assembled and ready to race in about 45 minutes. It’s also a hobby that grows with you, and at the extreme end—if your interest runs that deep—you might find yourself adding carbon fiber parts and tweaking rollers and brakes by the millimeter to eke out faster lap times. Mini 4WD has something for all levels of racer, from casual to crazy.

A whole new world

This video has also been my introduction to 4WD Mini—and it’s a vast world with a long history, stretching back to the ’90s. Video editor Aulistar Mark is a veritable fountain of 4WD Mini trivia, and he passed this tidbit to me in email as the edit was being locked:

Mini 4WD is an interesting international phenomenon. One aspect we didn’t get into, is the 90s Anime Bakusō Kyōdai Let’s & Go!! which is bound to come up in the comments. Bakusō Kyōdai Let’s & Go!!, was localized in the US as the Saturday morning cartoon “Let’s & Go!!”. The series also had several licensed games for multiple platforms in the 90s, with a couple remasters released for mobile. This would be a precursor to the Yakuza series Mini 4WD mini-game. It’s great stuff for nostalgia, since the 90s cartoons were very much made like Bandai/Hasbro cartoons designed to sell toys.

If you guys like this pilot and like the series concept, we’d love to hear some ideas in the comments for additional racing circuit types to check out—please let us know!