To start out, this isn’t my first 8S Kraton. I had a V1 Kraton, and owning it was a miserable experience for me. Seemed like every time I took it out I bent or broke something. I was very hesitant on buying the V2 for that reason.
I’m so glad I didn’t listen to my gut.
I forgot just how much fun it is to drive one of these. When my V1 ran, I absolutely loved it. Handled incredibly well, jumped level, and was in a class all by itself when it came to sheer performance on this scale. This truck is very much the same, and then some. Here are some of my observations on the first run of this beast.
Performance:
It jumped high and air control is effortless. It actually outperformed my XRT in this aspect by an impressive margin. It cornered like it’s on rails, and not one single traction roll out of it. The speed is actually comparable to my V1 with the 800kv Castle combo I had in it. The new motor and ESC are on point. I have zero plans to upgrade them, which for me, is very odd. The torque comes on very strong, and the throttle response is immediate, and I did not turn up the punch at all. I did turn up the brakes from the factory 25% to 50%.
Steering:
The new servo is a massive improvement over the V1 factory servo. It’s somewhat quick, it’s a full 1/5 scale size, it has loads of torque, and runs on 8.4v right out of the box. As a matter of fact, the ESC factory setting is 8.4v. What lets the steering down, as was with my V1, is the servo saver. It does ok, but needs to be a bit stiffer. The servo returns to center well, but the servo saver does not, so there’s a lot of correction to be done while steering. It’s not a dealbreaker, but I’m going to be looking for a better alternative.
Motor/ESC:
I have nothing negative to say about this combo. It’s astounding how well Arrma did with this. The ESC is extremely nice in the way it programs, since my Spektrum program box isn’t yet comparable with it. More on that later. The motor is head and shoulders above the old one. I couldn’t replace that one fast enough. I will probably never replace this setup. It’s that good. Power is immediate and very smooth. Very impressed.
Programming:
I plugged my Spektrum V2 programming box into the ESC and it gave the message “please update firmware”. That’s no biggie, out comes the laptop, downloaded the latest spectrum app, and as it turns out, my version of firmware is the latest version. So I guess they haven’t released the newest version of the firmware for the program box. Bummer. But it’s all good, it’s a cakewalk to edit settings just using the buttons on the ESC itself.
Telemetry:
I use a DX5 Pro radio, so after binding it with the stock Spektrum receiver, I found that this setup has an insane amount of telemetry data on the radio. I can check temps, read motor RPM, battery level, and a ton of other stuff. It’s awesome.
Battery Life:
Let’s face it. It’s a 30+lb. Truck with a huge motor. Comparatively, battery life will be abysmal. I got about 20 mins of hard running out of a pair of Spektrum G2 6800mah Basher series batteries. About 10 mins shy of what I get out of my XRT with the same batteries. I already expected this, because my 800kv Castle V1 was about the same. It really doesn’t bother me at all, because I usually have a couple trucks charged up and ready to run when I go out to bash, so it’s just not that big of a deal. That’s the price you pay for this level of performance.
Durability:
The elephant in the room. How did the truck hold up? As I mentioned, that was the Achilles heel of the V1, at least in my experience. The simple answer is that it did not have a single issue! First off, I was not being gentle on this thing. I was jumping pretty high, back flipping, I cartwheeled it, I landed a particularly high jump directly onto the wing, which consequently acted as a shovel and dug a chunk of dirt out of the ground almost 2” deep lol. I lawn-darted it trying to do a front flip, and I did beat it pretty hard. Absolutely nothing broke. There’s no way they didn’t change something about these A-arms. They took some direct hard impacts with zero problems. This thing is an absolute beast of a truck!
The Verdict?
This may just be my new favorite truck. Other than a better servo saver, I have zero upgrade plans. I’m actually happy with it as-is. And that feels icky.
