This Week in RC Car History: Tamiya Drops the Avante and Takes Racing Seriously

March 1988: Tamiya Draws a Line in the Dirt

By the mid-1980s, Tamiya was everyone's favorite brand at the hobby shop, but walk into any serious race meeting and you'd have a hard time spotting one of their cars in the A-main. The tracks had been taken over by the Associated RC10, the Kyosho Optima, the Yokomo YZ-834B, and the Schumacher CAT — purpose-built racing machines that left Tamiya's beloved buggies gasping in the dust. Tamiya had practically invented the 1/10 electric off-road market with cars like the Rough Rider and the Frog, but the rest of the industry had caught up and moved on. Something had to change.

On March 31, 1988, something did. That's the date the Tamiya Avante (kit #58072) officially hit dealer shelves in Japan, and the RC world sat up and paid attention. Unveiled earlier that year at the Nuremberg International Toy Fair, the Avante was unlike anything Tamiya had produced before. Where previous kits relied on ABS resin plastic for their structure, veteran designer Fumito Taki — the same man who first put Tamiya in the RC business — reached for aluminum and fiberglass-reinforced plastic composite instead. The result was a double-deck FRP chassis wrapped in aluminum hardware, a motor mounted amidships and parallel to the driveshaft, ball differentials at both ends, foam-insert tires, and four-wheel independent suspension adjustable far beyond anything Tamiya had previously offered. At 34,800 yen in Japan, it was priced to signal intent.

The Avante was also the car that lit the fuse for the Tamiya Racing Factory. In 1988, early TRF members entered the Avante into the JMRCA Championships in Japan — the equivalent of the U.S. ROAR Nationals — and used the lessons learned there to prepare for Tamiya's first appearance at the IFMAR Electric Off-Road World Championships. TRF, the three letters that would later appear on some of the most celebrated touring car and buggy platforms of the 1990s and 2000s, existed from the start specifically to develop, test, and race this machine.

As a competition car, the Avante was complex and heavy, and it never threatened the RC10 or Schumacher CAT for outright race wins. But its importance to the hobby runs deeper than podium results. The midships motor layout, the composite double-deck chassis, the use of foam tire inserts, the extensive use of ball differentials — features that feel completely ordinary on a modern buggy — were pushing boundaries in 1988. The Egress arrived the following year to refine what the Avante started, and within a few seasons TRF was a genuine international presence. Every TRF chassis you've admired since traces a direct line back to this one late-March release.

Today the Avante is a legitimate collector's piece, with new-in-box examples commanding prices that would have baffled anyone who bought one at retail nearly forty years ago. The re-releases from 2011 onward give newcomers a faithful look at what Taki was reaching for, but nothing replicates the moment of cracking open that original metallic blue kit for the first time.

March 2026: Fifty Years and Still Running

The timing of this week's column is no coincidence. Right now, as you read this, hobby shops are receiving another late-March Tamiya milestone: the 50th Anniversary Porsche 934 kit (#47524), arriving this week after selling out in multiple regions before it even officially launched. The limited-edition model celebrates the car that started everything — Tamiya's very first RC model, the 1/12-scale Porsche 934 Turbo, released in November 1976. The commemorative 47524 kit features a bespoke 2WD chassis with the motor positioned lengthwise at the rear center to mirror the actual car's layout, magnetic body mounts for display, and a unique numbered plate included with each kit.

The Avante in late March 1988 and the 50th Anniversary Porsche 934 arriving in late March 2026 are separated by nearly four decades, but they tell the same story: Tamiya has always understood that this hobby is as much about the build, the history, and the craft as it is about lap times. That's why kits from both eras are still being opened on workbenches right now — and why there's never a shortage of RC history worth revisiting.