We picked up this Tamiya TT-01E a while back, and we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to dig into it. Its a fun car to drive stock, but there are a few areas where we feel the performance could be greatly improved with a little work.

One of the easiest upgrades is in the suspension. The TT-01E comes with friction dampers, rather than shocks. The friction dampers are simply a plastic tube, with a plastic insert. There is no oil as in a normal shock. The friction of the plastic on plastic is all of the dampening it has. There is a coil over spring on each damper. There is no ride height adjustment, the only tuning you can do is to move where the dampers are mounted.

We drove the TT-01E in its stock configuration before installing the new shocks. There are a few things to point out with regard to the suspension. First, any bump in the road disrupts the car dramatically. When turning, if you hit a bump, it causes the TT-01E to skid out. Also, on power, the car tends to push quite a bit.

We picked up a set of Yeah Racing Dampers from RCMart.com. These are 55mm in length, very close to the length of the stock dampers.

The Yeah Racing Shock-Gear 55mm Damper Set is easy on the wallet, and it offers a ton of tunability. Not only does it come with 5 different sets of springs at various rates, but it also has what they call the “Rebound Core System”.

“The Yeah Racing Aluminum damper set comes with 6 different damper pistons for fine-tuning the rebound characteristics. The set of 3 general type pistons allow you to adjust 3 different rebound rate where has the same depression and compression resistant. While the “V piston” featured a v shape damper oil tunnel which allows the compression rate to differ from the compression rate for more precise tuning. For instance, a rear wheel drive RC can be benefit by a stiffer rear wheel compression rate to offset the weight transfer during hard acceleration while maintaining balanced depression rate throughout the whole car.”

The shocks come disassembled, but are very easy to assemble. One nice benefit is the shock set comes with 300 cst oil, which is about the same as a 27.5 weight oil.

It also comes with ball studs to replace your stock hardware.

We drove the car again after the upgrade. Check out the video down below. But first, you must agree, these shocks definitely look better than the stock dampers.

The Yeah Racing shocks are a huge improvement over stock. The car was glued to the road even over bumps. Also, the car had increased steering. So much so that I had to turn down the dual rate on my radio.

We’re not sure which direction we are going to take this car. Should we keep upgrading it as an onroad touring car? Should we convert it to a full on drift machine? Let us know in the comments below what you think. Here’s the video with the before and after.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/0WAqfaQhAMg[/youtube]