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This ESC presents you with a significant amount of tuning and configuration options (especially when used on the PC link) if you choose to use them. During the course of over a year of development, the staff at Castle Creations and our Factory Team drivers have developed these suggestions to allow you to get the most enjoyment possible with these easy to use and powerful brushless systems.

Some special considerations with high power brushless systems:

These systems are capable of putting out over 1,000 watts of power. As a comparison, an average 10 turn system might be capable of around 200 watts. When that much power is flowing from the ESC to the motor, you need to be careful about your radio installation. If the antenna is near, or laying against those high power wires, you will have very poor range. Make sure to locate the Rx and antenna routing with as much physical separation as possible from the motor wires. Another helpful tip for any electric powered vehicle, is to keep those wires as short as possible (less resistance = better voltage and more power) and also twisting or braiding them helps to choke the energy fields that surround them. So remember – short and twisted/braided motor wires not only improves range, but also leads to a neater installation and more power!

Gearing, Torque and Top Speed:

High power capability brushless systems can act very differently than brushed systems and even differently than other brushless car systems. Where you used to approach gearing from a sense of managing the torque of the motor (smaller pinion gives the motor more torque), in this system you’ll need to look at gearing only as a simple matter of top speed at full throttle. For example: If you are not able to get up to full throttle on the longest straight at the track (car is too fast) you should gear down to the point at which you are actually using the whole range of the throttle trigger including full throttle at times. If you never get to full throttle, or have to dial down your throttle EPA, you are running the system hotter and with less runtime than you could have if you geared down. So again, think of gearing only in terms of what speed you can actually use at full throttle.

A high power capable brushless motor in electrical engineering and physics terms, has unlimited torque. We live in “the real world” so technically for us that’s not totally true, but – a brushed motor has a torque level that due to its design has an upper limit, regardless of how much power is being applied to it. That limit is low enough that you can see it clearly on an average track On the other hand, a high power brushless motor’s limit to torque in an RC vehicle is not within the bounds of the motor itself so much, but rather falls on the ability of the battery to deliver current to it. We generally don’t describe these motors in terms of “one has more torque than the other”, but rather “the 7700Kv motor is faster and draws more current than a 5700Kv motor in the same vehicle”. It draws more current, because it’s making the car go faster and doing more work than the 5700 motor is. As long as the batteries used are very good at supplying current without an excess of voltage depression (low internal resistance is good) both motors will appear to have the same torque, even though one is much faster than the other. Battery technology is constantly improving, and the first thing you’ll notice when you use a very good battery pack (or perhaps trying a Lipo pack for the first time) with these systems is a more “punchy” feel when you accelerate. The faster you set up the car to go at full throttle, the more reliant you are on good batteries to flow that current into the motor and maintain acceleration performance. So think of torque as a function of battery capability only.

You may have noticed we didn’t introduce many “don’ts” in the manual for these systems. The power capability for the ESC and motors during our development tended to be well beyond what most users would ever dream up for realistically driveable gearing options. The only real upper limit to gearing is the temperature of the motor. As long as the motor is less than 200 degrees F (would burn your finger almost instantly) at the end of the run, you’re OK.

Special Note on Timing Advance:

From the guidelines above, if the batteries are controlling punch, and gearing is only controlling top speed, where does that leave timing advance to come in for a brushless system? Timing advance in brushless is controlled within the ESC itself instead of rotating the endbell on a brushed motor. Brushed motors are very sensitive about where they are set, and can show large performance (and wear) differences with just a few degrees back and forth. Brushless systems are completely different. Imagine if you could tune the timing of your brushed motor “on the fly” thousands of times per second while you were driving to get the best performance from the motor each time you hammered on the gas out of a corner, feathered the throttle through a sweeper, or goosed it through a long set of doubles. Well that’s exactly what’s going on inside your Mamba Max ESC! What you’ll find when you experiment with timing advance settings, is that going up or down from the normal setting will cause two reactions. With each step down from normal, your motor temp will go down and the top speed will go down about the same as dropping a tooth on the pinion. Going up, it’s just the opposite – it’s like adding a pinion tooth, but the motor temp will go up.

Over time with testing, we’ve found it’s best to use a lower setting in order to keep motor temps in check, especially with very very fast setups. Like we talked about in the section above, it’s best to use gearing only for top speed and not necessarily bump up the timing advance to go faster. Where we’ve found this setting most useful at the track, is having a basic setup on the ESC using the normal timing advance setting, and the correct pinion for the track. As track conditions change (either a dirt track going away as it dries, or a carpet track coming in after several rounds) instead of changing the pinion to match the track, just plug in your ESC and drop the timing down for a slower track, or raise it for a track getting faster. >>> Continue to Page 2 >>>