What is it like owning a RWD Sakura D4

After a short period time of owning 50:50 Thunder Tiger chassis back in 2012 (TT-01 was just a dream for me that time) and several years break from RC altogether, when I started looking for a RWD chassis, I was almost a complete beginner in RC drifting.

Not really knowing if I would stick to the hobby this time, my main concern was to keep the budget as low as possible. Therefore my sight inevitably ended up on 3Racing Sakura D4 RWD.

My initial setup was:

• 3Racing Sakura D4 RWD (108 $ on rcmart.com)
• Hobbyking X-Car 120A brushless ESC (39 $)
• Hobbyking Turnigy Trackstar 10.5T sensored brushless motor (38 $)
• Hobbyking Turnigy  5000MAH LiPo (23 $)
• Hobbyking Trackstar Gyro V2 (22 $)
• Secondhand Hi-tec 2.4 Ghz radio (about 45 $)
• Old analog Hi-tec servo I already had (0 $)

Complete expenses including body shell, shipping of parts etc. was around 360 $ to get me drifting. Not bad, huh? As if..

As soon as I assembled the chassis, I ran to the newly discovered local drift track to get some slides. Pretty optimistic. Turning the ESC switch on, I immediately realized I was not going to slide anywhere.

Given by the out of the box design, the toe-out and ackermann were so extreme, I had to borrow a dremel straight away and cut both steering ball ends and turnbuckles to be able to set it reasonably.

I set the gyro gain somewhere in the middle and gave it a first try. Ouch! The car was undrivable. On the carpet track, I had absolutely no grip on the rear. As soon as I touched the throttle, I spin out.

So I switched the battery to the rear and finally made some nervous skids. But no way I could fit my 2016 NSX body on the chassis like this. So what to do now?

I came up with a nifty design. Using posts and a piece of plastic, I made myself a weight shift battery mount! The body fitted just right and the weight distribution provided me usable amount of rear grip.

So I was finally able to manage some laps around the track, but my ride was pretty quick to bring me some more issues to solve.

Firstly I had realized, that the cause of unexpected snap-spins, besides my lack of skill, was locking of front wheels, which were driven by gyro into the suspension arms.

Looking closely to the front of the car, I noticed there was some weird geometry going on. I hit the internets just to find out I would need a new set of KPI knuckles to fix this.

In fact I did not like the whole front. The upper arms were sloppy on the ball joints, lower arms were thicker than they needed to be and the steering itself felt wobbly.

So I decided to purchase my first upgrade, which was a discounted Boom Racing  set of all knuckles with bearings and adjustable steering from Asiatees, leaving the other parts for later.

Swapping those parts, the front wheels were giving me a nice contact surface throughout the steering travel, however the steering itself remained sloppy.

I kept driving the car like this for some time. When not driving aggressively, it was quite predictable, giving me enough control for practicing my skills.

I borrowed a set of soft progressive springs for the back dampers and it made a world of difference!

I could not even believe how much smoother and slidier the car became. Together with front monoshock, I finally experienced a proper weight shift plus rear wheels traction had also improved a few bits.

For the first time I felt at least halfway as comfortable with the chassis as I would like to. All until the point when I have decided I needed to get my steering more precise.

Again I zoomed my eye towards the front of the car.

I threw out the servo saver, instead of which I used a simple servo arm and swapped the servo link ball cups for tighter ones.

 Then I got a set of Boom Racing upper arms (with a shaft instead of ball joints, very nice).

Also just to bling it out I purchased both front and back lower arms and silver carbon fiber decks. Everything Boom Racing from Asiatees, because the price was a bargain!

Switching the car on brought me a very strange surprise. I expected everything to be razor sharp and buttery smooth but the thing was all over the place. Front wheels wobbled like crazy when I just gently touched the steering.. ..what the hell?

Eventually I figured out (not really me, but rather my track colleagues), that my good old (analog!!) Hi-tec servo was not really that great. The steering slop was just so big, that it covered all the servo madness and the output was – believe it or not – drivable.

Okay, so I clamped in a brand new Savöx 1252 low profile servo and voila! The steering was almost right on point. Maybe a little too fast – I could use slowing of servo speed on my transmitter, but my ancient Hi-tec does not have the feature, too bad.

Adding all those handsome pink thingies had also one more pleasant impact. WEIGHT!

I never expected the car to be that much heavier, but a big ass difference was there. Suddenly I gained much more confidence. My slides became longer, more controlled and I could apply more throttle pushing the car into the outside edge of the track, able to tick my back bumper around the fences.

My journey with this both great and miserable piece of engineering has just begun. I have gone from around 360 $ starter kit to over 700 $ halfway there project, knowing I will stick to the hobby (and turning out I’m a tiny bit less of a cheapo than I thought).

It still has plenty of issues, but I believe, eventually, we will get there and I will be able to honestly say, that my Sakura is a pleasure to drive.