Extreme Tire Ballooning On An RC Car… How Did That Happen?

RC cars and truck crank out some pretty extreme forces. With the advent of brushless motors and lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries, electric RC vehicles are capable of clocking off triple digit speeds out of the box. Modify them a little and things get completely out of control.

One area that’s often overlooked when it comes to dealing with these extreme forces is the tires used on RC cars and trucks. These tires reach some insane speeds, but they have to be soft enough to provide traction in some less-than-idea conditions, which means when they’re allowed to spin freely, they do some thing you simply wouldn’t expect, like stretch out to the size of dinner plates.

I had a brushless E-Revo from Traxxas that would do this sometimes. The key is to hold two or three of the other tires still, which redirects all of the motor’s power to the one wheel that’s allowed to spin freely. With all of the juice running through one quarter of the drivetrain, things get out of control pretty quickly, as you can see in the video below.

This doesn’t look real, but believe me when I tell you, these tires are very soft, but very durable, meaning they can easily stretch this much and return to normal with very little permanent damage. If you run one wide open and let it stretch like this for several minutes, it may stretch it past the breaking point but slinging out out like a tiny pizza crust for a few seconds like this won’t hurt anything, and it’s pretty cool to watch.

We know some of you guys have RC cars and trucks, why don’t y’all head out to the yard and video your rides in action. If you get your tires to balloon like this, we want to see it, so post the video on our Facebook and we just might share yours too!