The 2wd Traxxas Slash. TQ and A Main winner. Nope, I’m not off my meds. It is a legitimate possibility.

Over the past few months, we’ve noticed how popular our 2WD Short Course Shootout was. We’ve been contemplating on how to give Traxxas some redemption. The Slash is, after all, the one that started the short course craze. A lot of companies came to the table at one point or another looking to put their mark on the platform, to make it competitive.

There are some companies out there that just make simple bolt on parts, others make entire chassis kits. For us, the biggest issue with the Slash is the high center of gravity. You just can’t dive into those corners like you can with the A-Main winning short course trucks from other manufacturers. (Associated SC10, HPI Blitz, Losi XXX-SCT, Kyosho Ultima SC, etc). If you try, the truck will invariably roll over, or traction roll. This is where the front tire will dig into the dirt, and the weight of the truck being so high pushes it over on its side. Or in our case, it barrel rolls for about 10 feet before coming to a stop on it’s roof.

So how do you fix the center of gravity issues with the 2wd Traxxas Slash? Well, you can put shock limiters in, and really slam it to the ground. The problem there is that you destroy any handling the truck had in the first place. No, you need to change the physics of the truck, no shortcuts. We need to find the right LCG (Low Center of Gravity) chassis. We decided to test 3 of them, head to head.

For our shootout, we chose three companies that have very different ideas on how to accomplish lowering the center of gravity on the Slash. First is the big dog, arguably the most popular in the Slash LCG game, STRC.

The STRC (ST Racing Concepts) LCG premise is to use some Traxxas Rustler parts and some machined extension plates. You wind up with a truck that is awfully close to the stock Slash length, but with a much lower center of gravity. Essentially, you are creating a long wheelbase Rustler (which does not have the raised chassis like a slash). Check out our build of the STRC Slash here.

For the second chassis, we scoured the internet, looking for the most out of the box thinking we could find. That’s when we found the Chuckworks RC Slice A3. It is a complete fiberglass chassis, and it turns your Slash into a mid motor design by mounting the transmission backwards. Not being a large name in R/C (yet), we disovered Chuckworks on ebay. Check out our Chuckworks RC Slice A3 build here.

The third has to be one of the coolest looking chassis I’ve ever seen, the WMD Eliminator V2. This one is cut from T6061 aluminum. Just like the others, you take your Traxxas Slash front & rear ends, bolt them on, and away you go. Check out our build of the WMD Eliminator here. WMD can be contacted through their Facebook page.

The Contenders

(In order, Left to Right: Chuckworks, STRC, WMD trucks)