The Tamiya Rally Block tires provided plenty of grip on all the surfaces tested. When traction would get a little low, the tires combined with the efficient 4wd system just dug in harder to keep the car going with forward momentum.

Below is a shot of the tires.

A zoomed-out shot shows you that there really aren’t many nooks and crannies to pick up debris on the chassis.

Being a rally car, the XV-01 does not have a ton of suspension. With it’s PRO level shocks the suspension it does have is nice and plush and provides superior handling. I would not expect to see anyone taking this car off of any 1/8 sized jumps though. That simply isn’t what it is made for. I don’t think this would work very well on a typical 1/10 offroad race track. I have seen videos of the guys that are heavily into rally where they make their own dedicated courses and run behind the car. For that type of competition, the XV-01, I have read, is a great car. I’ll stick with what I know though for this review and tell you what I think from my own, non-rally background.

The car is a lot of fun to drive. If you had a couple friends and an old dirt lot, or even like our test area, I could see setting up a makeshift course for these in a half hour or so. Get a few of them together and it would really get interesting. For me, the fun lied in finding the areas in which to run the car. We’d drive down the truck trail and find a spot, run the car a little and move on to the next spot. We encountered a few different types of surfaces through this outing. We had a thick, tacky, clay/mud area in our first test area.

We had no problem driving in the slick terrain. It was a little slippery, but the tires did their job and kept the car scooting along just fine.

The time of year we are doing this may not have been so ideal, but we made do. That first spot that was a little slippery, sometimes we got a little too close to the edge of the road. With thick foliage on the ground, we got sucked into outer part of the ditch and into deep piles of leaves. They were much too deep for the XV-01’s tires to claw their way out of. We were stuck.

At the other spots there were a lot less leaves and we didn’t have this issue as much. We found a couple open areas where we could really let the power loose and do some sweet burnouts, powerslides, and donuts. This is where the car really shined. It was a blast tearing up the dirt road. The truck trail turned out to be an awesome test ground, with a variety of surfaces.

Here we are testing it in a less muddy, more hard packed dirt area. It felt very much as home here.

The smooth, harder areas were where we could really get into the throttle and we even did a couple donuts! You’ll see those in the video at the end.