If you have been around the one-tenth scale EP touring car scene for a while, you know the drill. You pop the body off your car, and it looks pretty much like every other car on the grid: two shock towers, four coil-over oil-filled shocks, a battening layout. It is a formula that works. But then, there is the Awesomatix. The first time you see one, it breaks your brain a little. Wait, where are the shocks? Where are the shock towers? Is that a rotating drum? This is the story of a small, obsessive brand from Lithuania that decided to throw the rulebook out the window and build touring cars like no one else.
The story begins not with a company, but with a whisper. Back in April 2007, grainy prototype images started floating around on RC forums. The rumored name was Awesomatix, the country of origin was Russia, and the design was completely bonkers. It was a shaft-drive touring car, which in the mid-2000s was considered ancient tech—everyone had moved to belts. But this was not your grandfather’s shaftie. The motor was mounted perpendicular to the center shaft in a layout nobody used, and there were no shock towers. Instead, it used weird, horizontal rotary dampers mounted low in the chassis. The forums went nuts. The car, later dubbed the A700, was the brainchild of a guy named Oleg Babich. While the brand was registered in Lithuania, the soul was pure Oleg—an engineer obsessed with lowering the center of gravity and eliminating the torsional effect that made shaft-drive cars twitchy.
It took years of development, and it was not until 2011 that the first kits finally trickled out to the public. I remember reading about the early adopters, like a German racer who got one of the first two hundred kits. He said he was drawn to the revolutionary design and the heart and soul Oleg poured into it. Owning an A700 was not just about racing; it was about joining a secret society of engineering nerds.
Once the A700 hit the tracks, the weirdness fully crystallized. This was not just a car; it was a rolling physics experiment. The signature features became legendary in the pits. Instead of a piston moving through oil, the rotary damper used a rotating vane inside a drum. The claim was that no shock towers meant a lower center of gravity, and the rotary action offered buttery-smooth damping that was immune to the stiction of traditional shocks. In later evolutions, they introduced a front gearbox that could float laterally, designed to decouple the front end from chassis flex and give insane steering feel on carpet. And while everyone else used plastic suspension arms, Awesomatix used carbon fiber ones. They looked fragile, but they were incredibly precise. The A700 went through a dizzying array of versions—EX, L, EXL, EVO, EVO II, EX2—each one tweaking the geometry, the materials, and the madness. It was a car that rewarded the meticulous. If you were the type of hobbyist who loved building kits with calipers, tweak boards, and setup sheets, the A700 was paradise. If you just wanted to slap electronics in and go fast, it was a nightmare. It was polarizing, expensive, and absolutely brilliant.
By 2015, the RC world had changed. Brushless motors were getting ridiculously powerful, and the complexity of the shaft-drive A700 was becoming a limiting factor. The torsional effects Oleg had tried to tame were still there, lurking. So, Awesomatix did the unthinkable: they evolved. In late 2015, they released the A800. The forums erupted again because they had gone to belt drive. But true to form, they did it their way. The A800 kept the iconic rotary dampers and the ultra-low center of gravity philosophy but ditched the complex shaft for a simpler, lighter two-belt system. A racer testing the prototype summed it up perfectly: it was easier to drive and they were always faster. He also noted the key improvement: the car was easier to work on and cheaper to buy. The A800 was not a betrayal of the original vision; it was a maturation. It took all the wild, theoretical advantages of the A700 and wrapped them in a package that could actually compete with the mainstream Japanese and European heavyweights on a weekly basis.
Today, Awesomatix remains a boutique player. They are not Tamiya or XRAY; you will not find them in every local hobby shop. But they have a cult following for a reason. When you build an Awesomatix, you are not just assembling a kit. You are appreciating the work of a guy who looked at a touring car and asked why it had to look like that. The rotary dampers, the floating gearboxes, the carbon arms—they are not gimmicks. They are solutions to problems most manufacturers did not even bother to acknowledge. For the hobbyist, the brand represents the ultimate tinkerer’s machine. It is for the person who loves the engineering of RC just as much as the driving. It is quirky, it is complex, and when you get it dialed in, it is absolutely magical. From a grainy prototype photo in 2007 to winning races on carpet and asphalt today, Awesomatix proves that in a world of copy-paste designs, there is still room for a little madness. And for that, we hobbyists are eternally grateful.