Anyone experiment with "overdrive"?

[Semi Pro]

no reason to on a 1/8 and here is why

as long as you have a center diff you are always overdriveing the front due to the nature of how power transfer works (the exception to this is a center tortion and overdriveing will destroy a torsion very quickly).

a good example of ths is set your buggy up with the standard 5/7/3k diffs and go out an punch the throtle hard, it will ballon the fronts as it takes off but not the rears, that is overdrive, changeing the diff ratio in the rear would reduce this but the buggy would be much harder to drive and it will put alot of stress on the driveline.

on a xxx4 and a rock crawler it works because you have a solid center diff

if you want tighter turning then overdriveing the front is the worst way to do it, you would be better off tuneing the buggy to oversteer or moveing more weight foward

[simplechamp]

Originally Posted by Semi Pro

as long as you have a center diff you are always overdriveing the front due to the nature of how power transfer works

I can see what you are saying, it does make sense. However, the center diff is not always unloading to the front, mostly just during that initial heavy acceleration and weight shifting. Seems like there would still be plenty of time where the center diff is distributing power pretty evenly, and the overdrive would be able to exert it's effect.

I can see both sides of it now, but it would be surprising to me if the big names like Xray and Mugen offered overdrive without it having any merit.