It took quite long time to write (mainly publish) this text about the first driving impressions of the SBX-410. Maybe now it is a good time to write and publish this since the new 2021 outdoor season is just about to start.

Last summer did end a little bit too early for me and along with it also the outdoor season. I didn’t get to drive the car as much as I would have wanted on outdoor track. Nevertheless the time I did spend on the track gave me quite a good feeling of the car. One interesting thing was that I had great confidence with the car after the first day. I did a couple of little tweaks to the first basic setup. Basically I just adjusted the car’s ride height to match the roughness of our track. I returned the camber to match the ride height each time. A small thing but it seemed to make quite a big difference on handling. I have not noticed this before with other cars on this level. The diff setup with 10k front and 7k rear did work quite ok on the clean surface. The tires had a good bite on clean clay but since our track is also designed for 8th scale use the line is rarely clean. By the way, the SBX410 challenges the 8th scale cars very well on high speeds and even on jumps. Of course this depends on the track. Our track is quite easy to drive and it is driven a little different lines with 10th (tighter line) scale and 8th scale (wider line).

What to change:

  • Diff oils 7k front diff and 4k rear diff. With this change the car would hopefully be a little bit easier to turn into corners and would not be so tail happy when exiting from slow turns. This also may compensate those little rough diffs. They still seem to have quite a bit stepping. Diffs needs to be rethought if there is something which can be done to make them run smoother. Will make an update on this if I find an easy fix.
  • O-rings to shock’s bleeder screws. Original plastic washer does not hold the pressure and I had problems with bleeding every day. Did a track fix from piece of plastic bag and surprisingly it stopped the bleeding.
  • Examine the roll center setup on clay and swaybar setup.

What I noticed:

  • Drive shaft’s cvd joints need to be serviced after every two days of driving. It seems that the cylinder inside the cvd joint is made of quite soft material and when the joint gets dirty or dry it will start causing friction and make quite a bit of noise. Quick cleaning with brake cleaner and adding some thick oil or graphite grease makes them run smooth again.
  • The car is quite robust and even though I had a doubt about the sizes of the bearings being too small. I had zero problems with bearings during the summer. I did not manage to break a single part during the summer. Than again our track doesn’t have super technical jumps or hard objects to hit, I can’t say if those would have caused more damage. Based on my experience I can say that the car hold out very well.
  • Since Corally has been struggling to get the optional swaybars and springs available, I ended up doing some research and found out that Xray XB4’s sway bars fit nicely to SBX-410. Sway bar mount is quite tight, so bars thicker than 1.6mm need some reaming to have enough clearence to swing smooth. Team Associated springs from B64 and B74 fit also perfectly to the SBX. When switching to Associated spring you will get much wider selection of springs to choose from.

My local club has opened a proper fixed indoor track this winter. This means that I will be running mostly on carpet this winter. I’m really looking forward to be running more on the proper carpet track without unwanted stress and hurry since the track is open 7 days a week and only about a 5 minutes drive from my home. Superb !!

I will write article about my impressions of carpet driving soon which includes few setup changes and upgrades. Hope to see you soon.

Edit: Read the new post about my thoughts of driving this indoors HERE