The most rare of the cars, and how I ‘ruined’ my first…
In Mid-2022 I purchased a beautiful Taiyo Racing Pickup 4WD from Japan.
There were many people looking to buy, but ultimately I won for a good price because it didn’t include the controller or battery tray, and the previous owner had “been artistic” with the tires, according to the listing.
From the listing, quote:
“Taiyo RC Racing Pickup 4WD 1/14 competition car body.
It is a consignment because it was very beautiful and he enjoyed decorating it.”
When the car finally arrived, I took a closer look at the wheels and quickly realised that these were not painted. Maybe dyed?
I grabbed a razor, and scratched the inside of one wheel. Orange. It was orange all the way down!
Searching the internet for Taiyo Colored Tires, but I could find no evidence of this being “a thing”.
Ultimately I asked multiple Facebook Groups whether they’d ever seen or heard of this. Most people commented how ugly they looked (at first I agreed), and so I shared my plans to dye them back to black again.
One lone voice told me to keep as-is, that they were limited edition. Oh how I should have listened…
At first I tried the regular Rit Black dye, however they only turned a weird baby-poo brown.
The next day I ordered some Rit ‘Dye More’ from Amazon, and used boiling water for 1.5 hours…
Finally, the tires were a nice deep black! Yes! Woohoo!
And then a day later, this happened…
NO. ANOTHER WEIRD TIRE CAR? ITS REAL?! Is it actually a limited edition thing?!
Did I just dye a super-rare orange tire Taiyo Racing Pickup 4WD to regular BLACK?
Then I noticed on the packaging of both these cars…
Is that… a limited edition sticker? Or just a toy show sticker as on the Typhoon?
Google Translate proved useless, so I went to Reddit’s /r/translate who told me the sticker translates to…
1988 Tokyo Toy Show Limited Edition
– Sticker on the front of the box…
6 Color 6 Band Set
#4 Band 27.145MHz
Yellow Body
So what are they?
These are indeed limited editions from the 1988 Tokyo Toy Show, perhaps celebrating Taiyo’s ‘Toy of the Year’ win due to their 1988 Typhoon hovercraft. I’ve written an article about these Limited Edition cars here.
Why are these ‘Competition’ Cars?
The ‘6 band set’ with very specific frequencies (not 27Mhz but 27.125Mhz for example) would allow them to race up to 6 cars at once.
This also explains how the competitions worked on The Early Bird Show in Australia, where kids raced Jet Hoppers (Turbo Hoppers) and Bandits against each other to win the cars as prizes!
For more information on these cars, see the article here.
Do you have others? Let us know in comments below, or contact me directly!