Finally, my WLtoys Vortex A979 made it successfully off-road. Let's skip the intro talks and get straight to the video!

During filming we took a few photos. The first one at the start (Vortex A979 still very clean :) )

Cooling the electric motor in the middle of the trail. A bit dirty, but the real mud bath is yet to come!

After mud bath!

At the beginning I was expecting, that filming this "cruise missile" will be more pain than pleasure. After that I must admit, the Vortex A979 has gained my respect. It is not a bad race car at all. Even though the car has relatively low clearance, it managed to make its way throughout the whole course I prepared and also bravely performed all the stunts in the video. Most of them were shot more than five times before the right drive-through was achieved.

A bit of statistics: using my NiMH 5Ah battery the car was driving almost continuously for ca. 2 hours and 30 minutes. The car drove almost 4200 meters. The word "almost" is important – the car is not designed for long rides. The electric motor can get extremely hot and if not cooled properly it can burn. I was regularly checking its temperature and when I couldn't hold my fingers on the radiator, I made a long stop to cool it down. I made some 4 or 5 longer stops because of this. This idle time was subtracted from the total running time mentioned above.

So one one side, my battery upgrade kit was a great success. The car's endurance was greatly improved and enabled us to records its behaviour in several different kinds of terrain. On the other hand the driver must be careful, check electric motor temperature regularly and make longer stops to cool it down. This is not a HengGuan P402 , which you can drive continuously for the whole day and the electric motor would barely notice.

Moreover, as I've mounted flexible skirts around the whole chassis to prevent dirt and water getting directly onto the electronics, motor and gears, these skirts have also proven to be a double-edged sword. On one hand, the skirts have really prevented most of the dirt getting inside, as you can see from the photos taken after the trail. Just a few drops of water and a few pieces of dirt. On the other hand, the skirts block air flow around the motor – i.e. actually preventing it to cool efficiently.

Warning : since the NiMH battery is much heavier than the original one, the driver has to be careful with long jumps. The chassis isn't really designed for such weight and some of the long jumps with hard landings seen on other youtube videos could be the last ones for this heavier configuration. So far so good, the car made it home safely, we have driven carefully.