Ellis Stafford, a Losi team driver from England, produced the first "turned around" Losi mid-motor car in late summer of 2005 and began testing. English tracks are much different from tracks in the US and Japan, including lots of grass, astro turf, and even tarmac. Very little English off-road racing is done on dirt.

As a result, the rear motor 2WD buggy concept, adopted by the two major U.S. manufacturers to gain forward traction on loose surfaces, is not necessary in U.K. racing. They have all the traction they need, and cornering ability is paramount. Stafford's initial work, while promising, showed just some improvement over the conventional Losi cars.

At the same time, Losi was working to develop what has become the xxx-CR by going back to the original xx-CR transmission and pivot block. This returned the point of interaction between the dogbone and the outdrive closer to the center of the car (longer dogbones) and brought the pivot point of the control arm hinges closer to the center (longer arms). The result is all-around better handling.

Losi obviously wants to sell its new car. They've invested much money and time in it, and believe, for most racing in the world, that the xxx-CR is best. We think that, at this time, Losi has done little or no work in California with the mid-motor concept.

At the same time, the mid-motor concept shows great promise in England, and the Team drivers there want to work with it to achieve better results on their specialized tracks. In our conversations with a number of Team drivers, they have all been understandably reluctant to talk about mid-motor conversions.

Photos here show what we think is the second such conversion, made by Chris Doughty, seen under his pit table at the recent Southport National. Richard Taylor won with the new xxx-CR, and the mid-motor cars never appeared in official practice or qualifying. We believe Stafford and Doughty worked together on this conversion.

These cars have been made by turning the Losi transmission around in the standard T-plate. The transmission case bosses that hold the bearings for the top shaft are carefully cut out and glued in on the opposite sides of the tranny case so the top shaft is reversed. The shock tower flips around with the tranny, and the lower control arms stay right where they were.

The first car with a re-worked tranny case to actually compete in a major event was built by a privateer who closely followed Stafford's design building a car over the winter.  He raced it in the first National of the year at Kidderminster, where the guy did pretty well with it. The car handled well, was plenty fast on the straights, and the driver placed well in that event. We think this inspired Stafford and Doughty to do more work, building the car with the re-worked tranny.