LRP Column - March 2017

Our most important trade show, the Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany took place in early February. Of course, LRP was also on site with the already well-known booth. Once again Nuremberg was the world epicentre of the model hobby industry. This is the only time when you are able to meet the “who is who” of our hobby without having to travel for thousands of kilometres. This time our Marketing and Graphics department designed the wall prints in tribute to Roland Völker’s World Champion title in IFMAR TC Modified. It really looked great. 

The biggest novelty for LRP and probably the whole 1/10 car racing scene was the release of the LRP Flow X TC Spec. Ronald Völker won the IFMAR World Championships in Beijing with the pre-production sample of it. Now you can get it to boost your car’s performance. Again in 2017, it was very obvious throughout the fair that the quadrocopters are still one of the big things in the model hobby. Everywhere people were studying the latest models. We did also introduce our latest quadrocopter models in Nuremberg including the amazing LRP Gravit FPV Xtreme 80 quadrocopter about which I will be talking later on and the completely smartphone-controlled LRP Gravit Smart Vision.

I am furthermore proud that we were able to announce our new Competition Car Line battery line with the revolutionary Graphene cell technology. Our budget brand ANTIX by LRP was also busy releasing their first ever RC Car. The MT-1 Monster Truck in 1/12 scale is great value at an exceptionally low price!

A great leap in battery cell chemistry has been achieved for this year’s Competition Car Line battery line. The magical word is GRAPHENE. The use of the battery cell technology with Graphene leads to significantly lower internal resistance than before. This leads to less heat built-up under load, resulting in maximum power until the end of your run.

The high-power HV-LiPo cells can be charged up to 4.35V nominal voltage each. This means 8.7V for a 2S LiPo compared to the 8.4V previously achieved. What this means in reality is that your battery will have significantly more power. Another real benefit for racers is, that according to the current racing rules worldwide, it is only allowed to charge the HV batteries to 8.40V for racing. This will increase the lifetime of your battery as you never fully charge them and therefore putting less stress on the battery. Yet, it still has more power than our 2016 line of batteries at 8.40V charging voltage! So for you as a racer, it is a win-win situation.

LRP was the first brand to introduce the LCG battery type into Touring Car racing. The P5 LCG  5600 battery (#430234) did conquer the scene in full force and won the IFMAR TC Worlds in Beijing as testimony to that. This ground breaking battery pack will still be available in 2017. But we have further improved this battery for 2017. It now has the new cell chemistry with GRAPHENE and also a capacity of 6400mAh making it a great choice for TC Modified and all Stock classes.

Our R&D team wasn’t done and went back to the drawing board. The result is a completely new battery type for TC Modified: the Ultra LCG Graphene CCL battery. It is again 2.5mm lower than the regular LCG battery leading to an ultra-low centre of gravity while it is also 44g lighter. This battery will surely be the new TC Modified reference pack for 2017! 

Product Manager Frank Weimer set his sights on producing an LRP-own FPV-Race-copter. In my opinion he fully succeeded in the aggressively cool looking Gravit FPV Xtreme 80. Its four brushless motors propel it up to an incredible top speed of 80km/h. This isn’t for the fainthearted. The 5.8GHz FPV-LCD monitor is already included in the box. You only have to attach it to the transmitter. 5.8GHz means that the video stream is real-time without the delay known from WiFi transmission. And I promise you, when you are flying at 80km/h you need real-time transmission really badly ;-)

The HD-camera’s main purpose of course is to deliver the video stream for your FPV racing activities but it still shoots great HD videos that can be saved to a MicroSD card. You can even shoot a video while flying in the FPV mode.

As already known from our other Gravit multicopters, the Gravit Xtreme 80 also possesses different flight modes, varying from the easy-to-fly beginner mode to the acro (batics) mode, also referred to as manual mode, where the self-levelling isn’t active and the angle of attack isn’t limited anymore. But beware; the drone is pretty powerful and fast – even in the restricted beginner mode.