A Real Life Tinker Gnome: 3RACING Sakura MG EVO - A FWD M class car. If the Tamiya M07 wasn't a tub...

Mini's are a strange class of car. Most racing in the US seems to be TCS type racing, which means, tamiya, and not much else.

There is a wide range of "other" brand Mini chassis out there. It caught my eye, and addressed the issues I have with the M07... so I bought the 3Racing Sakura MG Evo.

Not to be confused with the...

Now that seems like a silly thing to say, but there's a fair amount of parts compatibility between the two cars. Enough that I am now VERY glad I chose this car versus some of the other platforms out there.

I've kinda danced around the subject. The 3Racing Sakura MG Evo is a M Class, FWD, double deck type touring car. It can do the 210, 225, and 239mm wheelbases (better than the M07!) and has a slew of nice features that make it a serious touring car.

Takes standard spur gears
Fan mount as standard
Stiffer than tamiya plastics
Threaded shock bodies
Oil filled diff
Swaybars

So... you get a lot for your $90. Lets look at what comes in the box.

It reminds me very much of what I got with my XQ1s. That's high praise.

There's a lot in there, and it's reasonably well organized. My one disappointment, was the manual.

It looks like to save money, they've gone to photocopied manuals. Well, of all the things they could have done, I think I approve of this one.

Here's everything spread out. From this photo, to "done" was about four hours. It was a very pleasant build. I give about half the credit to using a M3 thread forming tap, and about half to those bags being done properly.

The first step, is to build the Diff. I'm not a huge fan of building diffs, and I like to do them later.. but since this is the "deepest" part of the chassis, that's where we gotta start.

The diff is only built with two bevel gears.

It comes with 500k diff "oil". Oil in quotes, because it's darned near silly putty.

The photocopied manual, doesn't like to stay open. ... I'm complaining about how the manual is to "hold open". That is a real stretch. :-)

The transmission is a odd combination of vertical split, and horizontal split. It's a 4 gear transmission, fully bearing supported. This is a spot where the MG EVO takes a back seat to the M07. Getting access to this section of the car, later on, is quite difficult.

As a point of comparison, the M07 is just a few screws on the bottom, and you get this access to the transmission.

Here's the sealed bit of the transmission.

That cage is what links the transission, and steering rack to the top deck and rear half of the chassis. Well, mostly.

The motor mount plate plays a role too.

Oooh, a knife, sharp things are dangerous. :-) That spur gear is one of the high points of this car. It gives us a full range of gearing options. Ok, this power section, needs to bolt up to something.

Oh... that looks like something. This is the bottom plate of the MG Evo. Everything eventually bolts to this. If you lookat the right side, you can see all of those holes. about half of those bolt the transmission and bridge down to the chassis. And you need to undo all of them to get to the diff.

Moving on, we get to assemble the suspension arms. These are nifty, in that they have all of the features for the MG EVO, and the fittings for the M07.

I found I had to ream about half of the arms to get free movement on the pins. Turnigy has a 3mm reamer for $7 or something. Totally worth the dollars.

After tapping, and attaching the suspension mounts, you get this.

It looks just about the same as any other touring car at this point. The right side has the rear suspension, this is the 210mm configuration. But now we go vertical.

The transmission and bridge get bolted up front, and then this rather chunky plastic frame gets bolted over the rear arms.

Here's a luxury part that comes with the car. Swaybars.

The Swaybars are nice. They don't interfere on anything, are free moving, and are easy to get set up. My car came with the same label locking collar, in spite of having 1.1 and 1.2mm swaybars. The front one, is picky with the orientation of the collar, if you get it wrong, it rubs on the swaybar bracket, or the transmission. You'll need to guess and check on that one.

The rear gets a swaybar too. The swaybar is held down by the top deck, and shock tower mount.

The rear shock tower bolts right up.

There are some additional holes there, for the 239mm shock tower spacer. That's not detailed in the manual.. I think. it just pushes the shock mounts out a bit so they match up with the 239mm length arm setup.

Now it's time for some uprights. Sadly, I only got photos of the front knuckles.

Those look a whole heck of a lot like the M07 parts. But they're better. Stiffer, they tap better. Well.. that "seems" better. Soft parts are often more crash resistant, and will get you better traction on slippy surfaces.

So, uprights installed.

And how about a servo. I went with a Turnigy Trackstar D99. The car doesn't come with a servo saver.

Unusual to this build, shocks came last.

They're plastic bodied, but threaded shocks. They do not have o-rings on the adjuster collars, but otherwise, they're just fine. They built up easily. I had no trouble with cross-threading.

Throw on some body mounts, and the battery retainers...

And that's really it.

Here's my M07, for refrence.

I went with a Datsun 510 body for this one.

Good news, is that it look great.

Bad news, is that it's 225 mm wheelbase. Changing wheelbase is another "low point" of this chassis. It takes a solid 15 minutes to get the job done.

I'm totally happy with the build process. The car seems quality from every step along the way. I'd totally recommend this car to anyone who's got a class to run it in.