All new this holiday season is the Radline Master Series of 1:24 Scale vehicles. The Radline includes 3 different body styles: a Buggy, A Stadium Truck and a Monster Truck. Though they all share the same chassis, variation in the body style and wheels makes them look entirely different from each other.

Radline released 2 versions of their vehicles. The Elite series is the one available in the toy section at your local Target store, and the Master series is the one available through hobby retailers such as AtomicMods.com. The difference between the 2 series of cars is slight, but cannot be overlooked.

For starters, the Master series comes with interchangeable crystals. This is probably the most obvious difference between the two series of vehicles. The Elite series comes in your option of 27 or 49 mhz, and each one of these bands has the possibility of selecting from 3 different integrated frequencies on the cars. This is a neat feature, but limits you to a maximum of 6 cars running at the same time, given that there is 3 on 49mhz and 3 on 27mhz.

Another cool feature of the Master series is the ability to directly replace the original servo with a higher quality hobby grade unit, such as the Hitec HS55. This is done very easily, as the Radline PCB takes the hobby style servo plug directly onto a 3 pin jack located at the top of the PCB. By replacing the servo on our test car to the HS 55, the drivability of the car increased incredibly. This is definitely the first upgrade anyone should do to their new Radline Master Series.

The Elite Series comes with a 5 pin servo plug that also hooks up to the PCB, but is unlike any hobby grade servo. While it is not impossible to adapt a hobby grade servo to the car, it does take some moderately advanced knowledge of electronics to complete the conversion.

Another differentiation between the two series is the full ball bearing set in the Master Series, while the Elite Series comes with plastic bushings.

The most obvious difference is of course the car names. The Elite series has the Fang (buggy), Warpath (monster truck) and Detour (stadium truck); while the Master series are called Warlord (buggy), Destructor (monster truck) and Pinnacle (stadium truck).

There are 4 additional features about the Radline that excite us the most:

#1.Radlines use an H-Bridge style FET!!! What does this mean? This means you can use the almighty 4562 FET to stack on your Radline and run fast, powerfulmotors such as the Atomic Chili!

#2.I guess I gave it up on the last feature. You can use the readily available, Mini-Z style motors! They bolt directly on.

#3.The Board handles lithium Voltage!!! Ludicrous speed here we come!

#4.Several Mini-Z parts fit on the Radline. We found that Mini-Z overland shocks and pinions fit, as well as the inside gears from a Mini-Z AWD gear diff.

We took our brand new Warlord out of the package and did a complete teardown to see what we could do with it. By tearing it down we learned about the above mentioned features. We decked out our car with all of the above, except for lithium (for which we are currently working on the best solution) and hit our dirt "test track" in front of our office. (All right, it is more like a flower bed, but serves as a great dirt testing facility and we are planning on building some jumps in the near future!)

The Radline was really impressive. It handled the rough terrain with ease and absorbed bumps amazingly. The coolest part had to be seeing it jump. Our Warlord would tackle jumps head on, jumping flat and long, in the same manner a larger scale off-road vehicle would.

Range was amazing as well. We drove our Master Series car as far as eye-sight would allow (about 200 ft) and never lost a bit of range!

We did find a couple of weak points. With the increased power of the Atomic Chili Motor, the drive train suffered a bit. The differential outdrives wore out fairly quick and we also broke the gears inside it. We need good, high quality ball differentials and aluminum Universals for the Radline. I wonder who will come up with some. Hmmmm...

The Radline offers great promise. Our wheels are turning already on how to improve an already great platform, so expect tons of tutorials, articles and products coming your way in the near future!

Written by Cristian Tabush
Edited by John Shanklin