Well it's a bit complex, I'll explain it. A company called Hobbypro (
http://www.hobbypro.com.hk/) make the cars, they have a brand name for their race cars, the name they used is Team C (
http://www.teamcracing.net/). Hobbypro make a lot of other RC brands too, like JConcepts. So Ansmann (
http://www.ansmann.de/) are an electronic distributor kind of and ask hobby pro to make them a special version of the Hobbypro Team C - TC02, But they ask for them to make it cheaper so then they can sell it cheap and still make profit on it
. So they get the TC02 and use plastic shocks and remove the bearings (I don't think this saves any money but they need to do this to make the pro version seem worth more). The Madrat also gets softer front and rear arms, but all the other plastic is the same as the TC02. Kawada (
http://www.kawadamodel.co.jp/) in Japan also get the budget version of the TC02 and rename it to the Kawada BX2
JP Richards uses Losi shocks on his I believe, but most of the guys seems to be running the original TC02 shockers which are very good.
I hope that clears it up
, I have just actually ordered a TC02 yesterday since I have the TC02T (The stadium truck) and I can get these pro versions for the same price as a Madrat + Expensive UK postage if I buy them from Hong Kong and cut out the middle mans profit. I've read on here that Ansmann have a deal that makes it a bit hard to get the Team C versions into Europe but there's no distributor over here so for me that's good, I can just get them from Hong Kong. Ansmann are doing an awesome job with advertising and bringing 10th scale buggies back to life so I'm all for them, but you can get a better deal out of Hong Kong if you don't want to spend a lot of money like me and you
.
It took me a little while to figure that all out hence why I bought a Madrat rather than a TC02 in the first place. I'm also 99% sure tcmodels (
http://www.tcmodels.net/) is the factory owned hobbypro/team c shop. I think they could do much better pricing on the kits there but they keep them marked up a bit to protect the resellers, which is fair enough, I get my parts from tcmodels and they ship fast and good