Ferrari F2001

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JANG's Impressions

I'm not going to lie; when the F201 was first announced, I wanted it more than life itself. My financial priorities on the time wouldn't allow me to get it, though, and I had to sit back with quiet envy and watch others try it out. It didn't take long before my unfulfilled enthusiasm yielded to sighs of relief that I had avoided a big disappointment.

Fast forward to 7 years later, and Ultimate Tamiya gave me an excuse to finally try this car out for myself and experience its strengths and shortcomings first-hand. I bought the lightly used rolling chassis on eBay with a brand new, unpainted body. In an extensive "pre-flight check" of sorts, I partly disassembled the car to make sure everything was in good running order, and to familiarize myself with the design and its inner workings. The driveline is fairly standard modern shaft-driven touring car fare, but with a center-mounted spur. Unfortunately the motor mount is not at all adjustable, meaning one size of pinion will only work with one size of spur, and Tamiya only ever released one other combination, a "speed gear" set, eerily reminding me of the TL01. The motor itself gets rather hidden & sheathed into a nook, limiting the amount of airflow it can receive.

The inboard rocker arm suspension is very cool to look at, but the shocks feature one-piece metal shaft/piston units with no holes. Oil moves through copious space left around the edges of the pistons. As a result, damping action is very limited. Up front I went about repeatedly installing thicker & thicker oil, and didn't stop until I had added the equivalent of 2000wt shock oil ("20,000wt" silicone diff oil), and the car still feels slightly underdampened. At the rear, the stock springs are sufficiently stiff that as much of the rear vertical movement comes from compressing the tires as it does from actually compressing the suspension. I suppose this is appropriate, though, as the full-scale Formula 1 cars work this way as well. All of that stiffness in the springs, though, transfers significant force to the rocker arms and shock mounts, causing upper chassis parts to flex & try to separate when the suspension is compressed.

Back up front, what I found most bothersome was the steering. The servo, saver, links, and single bellcrank all fit incredibly snugly, requiring some finger gymnastics to get everything installed. Depending upon the servo you use, you may need to use spacers or trim some parts to get them to fit. The actual steering/toe links attach at a most awkward angle, generating a very significant amount of bump steer (toe-out on compression in this case). The maximum steering angle is limited, but not by any sort of normal, intentional stops. Instead, one or another component simply hits another. The steering knuckle at the inside wheel hits the pushrod ball end. The outer wheel's inner toe link ball stud hits the inside of the lower wishbone. The inner toe link ball cups also jam into a part of the center chassis structure.

Returning to the rear one last time to get all of the electrical components hooked up, you discover a tiny electronics bay on the left side, just large enough to fit a micro receiver and very small ESC. When it's time to drive, your battery wires had better not be too thick, as they need to take a couple of very sharp turns in order to avoid pushing outward on the body.

Speaking of the body, though, it's a thing of beauty. Molded multi-piece components are used for the front and rear wing complexes, and the polycarbonate body includes a separate nose cone (with a spare included with the kit) and side winglets, plus an ABS driver head you can attach and just enough paintable detail in the cockpit to make it look believable from a distance. The proportions of the body are actually quite distorted in order to be able to fit a standard 6-cell sub-C battery, but it's not obvious unless you either look intently or regularly watch 1:1 scale F1 racing. The use of inboard suspension allows for very realistic-looking shaped wishbone arms, and the wheels and high-profile, grooved tires are quite accurate. In all, it's truly a sight to behold.

On the track, for all of its design misgivings, the car actually handles quite controllably. The 4WD gives ample forward traction, but running on an asphalt surface with no recent traction preparation, and no traction compound on the tires, on-power oversteer was easy to tap into. The previous owner had set a good deal of toe-in at the front, presumably to help stabilize the car, and I left this alone. The car exhibited minor understeer entering turns at neutral throttle, but off-throttle an absolutely massive amount of steering materialized, which made for a unique driving experience.

Indeed, if you ask around or trawl through old forum posts, you'll find that racers had little trouble figuring out ways to make the F201 "work" on their tracks with the help of a dizzying array of tricks, some of them a bit counter-intuitive, though the gearing & motor cooling misses have never been solidly addressed, leaving power options limited. Myself, I'll always admire the F201 for its looks and what it aimed to do, though in my ownership these will never be more than shelf queens.

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