Howdy there, it's Phillip Enriquez and this is a chassis focus my prototype independent suspension UF1 car. This prototype is the 5th iteration of a project that really began in 2019 when the 3Racing FGX was all the rage. When I drove that car, I really liked everything about it because it was as realistic as it could get with F1 in mind. However, that car had major issues when compared to your traditional pan car F1. The biggest 2 issues to solve were the extra weight and most importantly the drivetrain friction losses. Right away, I started my project by trying to modify the FGX, but after a whole season of trying all sorts of ideas, I really couldn't fix those core fundamental problems. So basically, a new type of drive train needed to be built entirely from scratch.

So looking at the problem, there was a bunch of skills and trades that I would need to learn in order to actually make my dream F1 car. Because ultimately, this is about creating a revolution in the RC industry and doing this alone was going to be very difficult. So over the course of the next few years, I went out to learn about everything with materials relating to composites and metals. How to machine them and how to make digital designs. But I also had to purchase a bunch of raw materials, machining tools and effectively create a small machine shop in my at home garage.

Effectively, the current family of my belt F1 cars began back in the fall of 2023. The main focus was to first develop the entire rear drive train. Because I had made the decision early on that I would only be machining the Carbon Fiber pieces, I needed to source a bunch of parts that I didn't want to make. So in essence, I had to do a deep dive and shop at so many hobby shops like those of Battle Bots, TQRC and all types of online hobby stores just to find parts that would suit my needs. Literally this took so many months to do, because when you try to find a universal driveshaft of 20mm almost nobody makes them that small. One thing that I didn't want to do is modify existing F1 wheels, so that meant that I had to figure out how to make the standard 14mm wheel hexes that would effectively fit your typical touring car suspension.

Because I have used Xray F1 branded RC cars for most of my time with the hobby, I had decided early on that I would base as much as I could with this manufacture's parts (Especially since they were all made in perfect Metric dimensions). So really my first major break thru was making the rear gearbox actually work. The biggest problem to tackle was to reduce the amount of gears used in the drive system. The genius of my idea was in simply putting a pulley pinion directly on the motor and run a belt all the way back to a standard touring car oil filled differential. With this, Friction loss is equivalent to that of your standard pinion to spur pan car system.

With this being my 5th version of the car, I pretty spent the long off season to completely redesign the car around the Team C RB19 F1 body. This meant that I had to cram everything into the small space available within the smaller body shell. Design wise, it meant that I had to shorten the wheelbase from 270mm to 258mm. To accomplish this, the R1 Wurks 1/12 scale servo had to sit vertically and the servo saver directly attached to it. With such a small space, keeping everything cool is critical and having a well placed motor fan in the design layout works in tandem with the air intake holes actually cut out of the body shell to serve the same critical cooling purpose to that of real F1 cars.

With all of the electronics sitting the center of the car, it has a perfect left to right weight balance and an ideal centralized mass location from front to back. In terms of power train, I have the car set up for the 2025 UF1 open class with a motor ranging from stock blinky 13.5T to 17.5T with a 2 cell 8.70v 5300mAh LiHV battery. For this design, I actually have a twin chassis built which was originally supposed to be just spare parts. So the second car has an exploratory power train of turbo timing 8.5T with a 1 cell 4.20v 8500mAh Lipo battery.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is how tightly packaged everything is in the rear end. Literally the gear box is composed of 3.0mm thick walls to which everything in the back mounts to. Originally, these were made of 2000 series Aluminum but I quickly realized that it was a bad choice because in the event of crash damage, bent parts would be difficult to replace. With carbon fiber as the base material, you get much of the needed flex and I simply added a bunch of black aluminum brackets for all of the core connection points. In essence, the rear gear box is quite literally a 6 sided rectangle made of about 100 individual parts. Because of this the car design contains triple the amount of screws to that of your typical F1 pan car and all of the hardware is made of titanium to save weight.

The other huge talking point of the car is that it's pullrod rear suspension. So what this means is that the rear shocks are placed as low as possible and the suspension rod is effectively being pulled when engaged. All of the compacted lever systems sit inside of the empty space within the rotating belt. The nice thing about this design is that access to the XLP shocks is conveniently easy and set up changes can be made on the fly. This feature comes in super handy with the UF1 open class as you constantly have to make ride height adjustments as the foam tires wear out over any given run.

For this project I have opted to use Xray's full line up of plastic composite parts for all of the suspension linkage systems. This is nice because on my previous 4 iterations, I was making custom carbon fiber arms that were very difficult to manufacture and had lots of binding issues. With Xray's flexible linkage arms, you have zero fitment issues and are free to set up the suspension to any settings desired. In all, I only had to design and build 17 individual carbon fiber parts with a Proxxon mini mill in my garage. All of those custom parts were machined manually by hand and I could have just purchased a miniature CNC, but I find great satisfaction in building things with my very own hands by following the instructions of my digital blue print drawings.

Overall, my journey with this design concept is still not over and my goal would be to make fully independent F1 suspension technology the norm by being superior to that of the traditional pan car. Ultimately my dream would be to one day see a UF1 grid full of just Independent suspension cars with designers pushing the technology even further. It would bring a smile to my face to be known historically as the revolutionist inventor that changed this area of the RC Industry forever. I would be elated if this car ever goes into full production and in the hands of hobbyists around the world. But until then, all I have to show for it so far is just 2 pole positions and I guess I just gotta keep on keeping on!