The Sinister is a bit more complicated to set up than a regular MR-02. It features tighter tolerances and a stiffer CF chassis than other models readily available in the market. These things, in combination with other features that are not available on other 1:28 scale chassis, can lead to some confusion and frustration on your way to dialing in your TGR Sinister.

With that in mind, we developed a short “suspension tuning guide” for the Sinister. This tuning guide offers a brief explanation of each adjustment, how it can be adjusted, as well as a good starting point based on our team cars.

We start off with tweak. Tweak is perhaps the most frustrating thing on a car; therefore it needs to be the first thing to go.

"Tweaked" is the name given to a car that over-steers (spins out) to one side and under-steers (won’t turn) to the other. This is usually caused by an out of balance rear suspension. In other words, the left side is stiffer or softer than the right side.

To set tweak on the Sinister you must first identify to which side the car is over-steering. If the car over-steers to the left for example, this means that the right side suspension force is pushing down on the right side rear tire more than its left counterpart. To solve this, what needs to be done is to increase tension on the left rear suspension to the point where it balances with the right. To increase tension, simply place one of the M2 washers underneath the rear of the suspension plate where the increase is desired. At times you might need less pre-load than what 1- M2 washers provide. Our advice is to purchase different thickness washers to deal with this.

On RCP there is only one way to go, and that is all the way soft. The softest carbon side plates are the 0.8mm ones, so make sure your car is equipped with these. Softer plates give you better traction on high speed sweeping corners, where rear-end grip is the most critical.

It is debatable as to which ones are best. On our base set-up we like silver. Even though the car comes with black, we have noticed that the car is a bit bouncy at times when running black springs. Gold springs are a good option if you are looking for a little more rear traction. Again, just like the carbon plates, the softer, the more rear grip you obtain.

Droop is the amount of suspension "sag" the car haves. This basically defines how much the tires drop down whenever you pick up the car from the track. The more droop in the rear, typically the more traction you get under acceleration and mid to exit corner. At the same time, more droop allows more weight transfer to the front wheels, so it tends to give more initial steering.

In the rear end you can adjust droop by placing washers underneath the front of the suspension side plates of the car. We typically start off with 2 M2 nuts plus one washer as our starting point.

For the front, we set droop essentially to zero. Achieve zero droop by placing enough washers underneath the steering block to where the tires don't drop down when the car is picked up off the floor. We have found this adjustment is also a pretty good starting point for your front ride height.

We run gold springs up front with on team cars, which are the original ones that come with the kit. If you need more initial steering use softer springs, if you want more exit steering, use stiffer springs.

Camber can only be adjusted in the front end of the Sinister and we select a degree that spreads tire wear evenly across the tread. We usually run between 1 and 2 degrees of camber on our cars.

Caster affects weight transfer to the front tires of the car. Typically the more caster you use, less weight is transferred to the outside front tire under initial cornering. This yields slightly less initial steering for a car, but will give more exit and on-power steering. We start off with the number 2 Caster brace which offers the maximum amount of Caster for the car.

Toe affects the initial cornering characteristics of a vehicle as well as its straight line stability. Typically Toe-in (tires pointing inward, think "toes in" while looking at your toes) offers more straight-line stability at the expense of initial cornering agility. Toe-out offers more initial steering agility at the expense of straight line stability. We like to set up our cars with 0 degrees of Toe. This essentially means the tires are not pointing in or out.