Sweep Racing Road Crusher Belted Monster Truck Tire Review
Do you have a way overpowered brushless 1/8 Monster Truck or Truggy? Is your truck so fast that it is simply impossible to drive full throttle? Do your current tires balloon so badly that they resemble the extra large pie at your local pizza joint when pinned wfo? For consumers like you, Sweep Racing has developed Road Crusher Belted Monster Truck Tires. We recently got a set and decided to give them a run for their money. Do they hold up to a good hard bashing? Do they make your truck easier to drive? Do they expand like normal tires? Read on to find out…
From: Sweep Racing USA
Direct Link: Road Crusher Belt MT Tires
Review By: Cubby
Pictures By: Tim Mohr
Specs:
Pre-mounted: Yes
Hex size: 17mm
Offset: 1/4″
Outer Diameter: 147mm
Width: 80mm
Weight: 308 grams
Part Number- C0001B
Price- $39 per pair
Primary Competition: There are tons of different monster truck tires on the market, but none that are belted like the Sweep are.
Build Quality: Upon close inspection, our bash crew didn’t find any problems. We didn’t find any excessive flash on the wheels, the tires were glued very well, and the tread pattern looked sharp, like it came from a fresh mold.
Ease of Use: Hey, everyone loves pre-mounted wheels/tires. Because they have been pre-glued at the factory, all you have to do is remove your stockers and bolt these right on. We spent a max of 5 minutes making the swap and ran into zero issues while doing so.
Traction/Grip: So… how hard was the rubber compound? It was fairly soft, like in the neighborhood of an M2 Pro-Line. This helped give the Sweeps a lot of mechanical grip when driven on pavement. Also, because they always remain flat (read- don’t balloon), this allows all the rubber to hit the tarmac all the time. When mounted up on our test mule ARRMA Talion, we felt they gave us more raw traction on pavement than any other tire we have tried. They gave so much traction that it wasn’t unusual for the Talion to lift its insider rear tire in corners. We were not able to test them on a proper high-bite dirt surface, like damp indoor clay or a blue grooved outdoor track (where we suspect they would also work quite well). Instead, we could only try them on a dry/dusty outdoor track and in grass, needless to say they did not excel on either of those two surfaces.
What the Sweeps were really designed for was on-road driving and high speed runs. We popped a big pinion and a 6S MaxAmps LiPo in our Talion and let it eat. With the stock tires, the truck was pretty much undrivable above 3/4 throttle. The Sweep belted tires were a completely different story. For the first time ever, we were able to drive the Talion to its full potential while geared up on 6S. With the Sweeps bolted on, we had no problem making full speed passes under complete control, something that was simply impossible with the stock tires.
We also ended up making a small track in an empty parking lot. The track had various corners from tight to a big sweeper and of course it had a long 250 foot straight away. The best lap time our pro driver could do with two different sets of “normal” tires was 24.2 seconds, his best time with the Sweeps was a 21.8. That is a huge difference, but it was easy to see that he could use all the power under the hood of the Talion when driving the belted Sweep tires, while he struggled to ever hit full throttle on the others. Needless to say, we were incredibly impressed with their lap times and with how easy they made it to drive our test truck while geared to the moon.
There are a couple of downsides that go along with Sweep tires. The first thing is weight- they weigh a lot more than normal tires. On our in-house scale, a single Sweep tire weighed 10.8 oz, while a Pro-Line Badlands weighed in at 8.7, and a stocker was only 7.3. That is a lot more rotating and unsprung mass that you have to lug around and for your power system to have to turn over. The extra weight also made our test truggy more sensitive to trigger inputs while jumping. Not overly so, but a little bit of trigger input, whether it was throttle or brake, went a long ways while running the Sweep tires. Another downside was their offset, which made our test truggy much more narrow than with normal wheels/tires. A more narrow form factor is good for catching less air at speed, but isn’t optimal for cornering stability and will change your suspension settings. The last downside was that the Sweep tires made our test truck feel slow. It certainly was NOT slow, but because it was actually controllable, it felt that way. While normal tires ballooned like mad on the Talion’s 6S power system, giving the truck taller gearing at speed and making it nearly impossible to keep going straight, the Sweep tires just put the power to the ground and was exceptionally easy to drive.
Final Verdict: The belted Road Crusher Sweep MT tires blew us away. They made our nearly impossible to control “geared for the Bonneville Salt Flats” 6S Talion easy to drive and provided a ton of traction while doing so. Our test crew thought they looked awesome and they have virtually no ballooning, even when free revving on 6S. No, they aren’t the perfect tires for every situation, but if you drive primarily on pavement or do a lot of high speed passes, we think the Sweep tires are an absolute must buy.
