Early in 2018 i was approached by a one of our shop drivers and good friend, Ray Carlin, about helping him with a project he got involved with. Ray's a cameraman and DoP for movies and tv and his latest project was to film an entire advertisement using RC cars.

As it turns out this hadn't been done before in the movie business and no one had any real idea how to go about it, so after a few weeks head scratching and bringing in another one of our shop team drivers Gary Hunter, we finally had a plan, a few mock up camera mounts and permission from our local 5th scale on-road race club CMCC (www.craigavonmcc.co.uk)a nice track and surface to practise on.

With a plan in place the next thing was getting to the shoot location which turned out to be the beautiful and bustling streets of Croatia's capital, Zagreb.

It was when we arrived we got to meet both the "hero cars" 12 hand crafted perfect replica's of the Formula E Gen 2 car done by Ben Millar of Millar models (ww.millarmodels.net)

Work of art, Ben killed it with the bodyshells. All running and fully rc built on top of Tamiya F104 chassis'

The filming of the advertisement itself went great, having never been on a set or custom to how things worked it was fantastic to watch how everything went off like clockwork, the only issue we encountered being unable to source enough bird feed to coax the pigeons down for a shot later in the day in the heart of the city!

My job was to drive the camera tracking RC which was a heavily modified Losi DBLX-E 5th scale running 6x lipo and 4 shocks on each end to carry the weight of the camera equipment.

After all was said and done the advert was released to great applaud throughout the movie industry, so much so that it was nominated and won double gold at the Clio Sport Awards.

Looking back at my time working (i feel like i need to put that in quotations) with the crew, the locals and my mates on such a project is defiantly one of the highlights of my life so far. I loved every second of it and wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

Click the links if you haven't seen the complete film or the 30min Making of Street Level documentary

The reason this has all came back to mind is that Tamiya have just announced they are releasing a replica of the Gen 2 Formula E car themselves on the new TC-01 chassis.

With more pictures and information being released about this exciting new TC-01 chassis being released everyday its clear its going to be a very popular car with bashers and racers alike. 

If you'd like to get your hand on one of the first batch of TC-01 Gen 2 cars when they are released (expected late August) we have opened up a pre-order through the website which you can order by clicking here and securing you get one once they arrive. I'd recommend you get in quick as I hear the first 3 are already reserved....