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I've had this car since it's debut in 97 if I'm not wrong. It was my first touring car. I just play around the parking lot and it's a lot of fun. The kit is easy to assemble but you need a lot of muscle to turn some of those self-tapping screws, quite tiring. The nice thing about the kit is that it comes with window masking that you just have to cut out and paste and the body came predrilled and have the wheel wells cut out for and the body is protected with a transparent film to prevent overspray. This is great for beginners. My body is the AUDI A4 STW. With the stock set up the car understeers. The car is forgiving and is easy to drive. The kit's pinion though is too small and combined with the 540 motor; the top speed isn't ballistic. The included belt tensioner is very useful in preventing the belt from skipping. The belt will stretch and skip after some time. The kit also includes a 15-tooth pulley along with a pair of 16tooth pulley, which can be used to overdrive either the front or rear wheels. Only a few cars have this feature of overdriving the wheels. (However for the overdrive feature to work effectively, the torque splitter unit should be used. Different sized pulleys can be used on the front and rear layshafts without using a torque splitter but it will create a lot of drag and topspeed will be affected. It will also place a lot of strain on the gearboxes.) The chassis is quite cramped but is tough and durable and will take some pounding before it breaks. I had to place the ESC on top of the steering servo and the receiver in front of the antenna mount. This raises the CG of the car. The TA03 chassis is very versatile and you can transform the car from TA03F to TA03FS to TA03R or TA03RS by buying just a few extra parts. Therefore you can experiment with different variations of the car and how it handles. Overall, I'm happy with the car and its great for beginners. I only bought a few optional parts for the car and these things are the things that I felt was necessary such as the Tuned Spring Set, aluminum counter shafts and bearings. For new drivers, a front bumper would help out a lot in preventing physical damage to the car as well as to the spur gear. The motor has a tendency to move out of position when you crash the car hard, head on into something such as a wall. When that happens, the gear mesh would be off and the spur gear would get munched up really fast and you can hear the car being noisier than normal. So, check the gear mesh periodically to make sure it's not off. Or else it'll eat up one gear after another. And one more thing that's essential when you run modified motors is the aluminum heatsink gearcover. The plastic motor mount is said to melt when running modifieds in the car. Then when the motor mount softens, the motor's position will shift and the gearmesh would be off.	Removing excess weight from the tub chassis In a bid to lighten the chassis , I took out my drill and drilled holes all over the chassis as well as on other parts of the car where possible. (Click title to see pictures of the drilled out chassis and know more about what I did )
	9/07/2000 My first race with the TA03F

Its Tamiya's third generation of the TA0 series hence the number 3. It's a 4WD belt driven car. But basically, it still use 2 gearboxes one for each end, front and rear just like the previous generation of the TA0 series. The difference between the TA03F and the TA01/02 is that it uses a belt to connect the 2 gearboxes together in favour of a shaft. One major difference between it (TA03F) and its predecessors (TA01/02) or any other car on the market is that it has its motor mounted in the front wherelse other cars has a mid-mounted motor.

There are many different versions of the TA03 series. There is the TA03F PRO, TA03F, TA03R, TA03RS, TA03FS, TA03 David Jun Edition (DJ Ed), TA03R-TRF (Tamiya Racing Factory), TA03RS-TRF, did I miss anything? That's all that I can think of. All of them use similar gearboxes and the same suspension components, the only main difference being the chassis. I've listed the differences between some of them: