Tosiaan, vain testiautot kyseessä ja tuskin runko on lähellekään samanlainen lopullisessa versiossa, mutta on kyllä mielenkiintoisen näköinen viritys.
http://www.oople.com/rc/photos/2010national-talywain/ XFactory 4WD prototype
Ellis Stafford wasn't doing this well in 4WD last year and with the widely publicised discontinuation of the XFactory X5 4wd buggy - what exactly was Ellis using?
The Xfactory guys were given free reign to run any 4wd chassis over winter to pick up ideas and help develop the next generation of XFactory 4wd - something that clearly seems to have worked since the guys had two new prototype test-mule chassis at Talywain to get some feel for their design concepts.
It has to be said, the guys were very reluctant to allow photographs but we arrogantly snapped away anyway whilst agreeing to mention just how early these prototype cars are - and if the concept doesn't work (which, it does to be honest) the final cars might well share no design elements with these early test cars.
From the outside, these new XFactory development cars are just an X5 - and even looking from beneath you'd be mislead by what appears to be an X5 chassis. The chassis is in fact hand-lengthened by 10mm over the old car which itself was shorter than most. The drivetrain itself is entirely new and uses two equal length belts to take power from the centre to either end. The centre itself is one of the most complex setups we've seen and a real contrast to the previous cars simple single-belt drivetrain design - doing away with all the hype about single-belt efficiency and moving toward the current situation where efficiency takes a back seat to overall balance, performance and usability.
First impressions are that the car has fallen into a bag of gears and some stuck - but joking aside, it's hard to see exactly what's going on. The motor is bang in the centre of the car and I saw several shafts, gears and pullies transferring drive to front and rear via belts as can be seen. Yes, I'm being deliberately vague, by request ;).
It was naughty to take these pics - if XFactory want, we'll take them down. But let's remember - these cars (2 here at Talywain and 1 in the USA) are just test cars with a lot of hand-machined parts bolted onto cobbled together chassis - any final car would look a whole lot different to these. Qualifying 2nd overall shows the potential of the layout however. We'll follow the progress of the cars during the year and report any developments on these early protos.
