I'm no big 'fan' of purple anodising - in fact I'd go as far as to say it's a bit tacky. With that said, I appreciate the fact the D4 has used purple anodising sparingly - the turnbuckles however are something else.

The Titanium turnbuckles are very nice quality as you'd expect on a car of this level, but it's the colour that stands out - somewhere between blue and purple, or more accurately a mixture of the two depending on the angle of the light hitting them. Pretty.

The rod ends supplied in the D4 kit are long and give a good range of adjustment - tools are supplied to adjust the turnbuckle and hold the rod end for installation. Hot Bodies have thought of just about everything here.

The rear hubs use a vertical ball stud which should be a good aid in tuning the handling of this car. The supplied ball studs are fairly short however, so if you want to go much higher with this ball stud you'll need to purchase optional longer items.

Much like the front, 12mm 'touring car' sized hexes are supplied - but unlike the front with its loose pins which fall out, the rear hexes capture the pins and clamp to the axle with the aid of a small screw. To use Losi / B4 wheels you can simply remove the hex and add three small washers (supplied) behind the pin.

I would imagine most racers will want to use Losi/Proline wheels and Hot Bodies have clearly designed their car to use both styles from the outset.

The rear hubs are the same both sides and use captured outer hinge pins - via a grub screw in the hub just like on the front of the car. The inner hinge pins pivot in rubber bushings at both ends and have a 0.75mm washer installed at either side, so the wheelbase can be altered slightly later on if needed.

A '3.0' rear hinge pin block is included in the kit, the '3' refers to the ammount of toe-in that it gives the inner hinge pins. Since the hubs are the same both sides they are 0-degree. Optional braces and hubs are available as hop-up items to alter the toe-in later if desired.

The shocks supplied with the D4 are unique to this car and are fairly complex in construction as can be seen from the photo on the right.

Three different pistons are supplied for the shocks - all with two holes but in three different sizes. There is also a fouth piston included which is blank - allowing the adventrous racer to drill their own holes for a 'unique' setup.

The seals in the bottom of the shocks assemble into an alloy cartridge which itself screws together before inserting into the shock body. The cartridge has a gap in the threads to bleed the shocks, which can be used with the cartridge a couple of turns out from fully inserted into the body.

Most competition cars don't come with tyres these days - for obvious reasons (all tracks are different). Still, I've never seen any car come without shock oil, which is the case with the D4. I can see the similar argument that you'd likely want to put on a good base setup for your local track from the start, which might be vastly different from the kit setup - but not including the 30wt oil for the 'kit' setup seems a strange, nay, bizzare ommision and means you can't get the car built unless you happen to have some laying around.

The shocks go together nicely but we found it a little hard to bleed the shocks so they were all the same - we were using the cartridge to bleed the shocks of air / oil which wasn't working too well. Once we switched to using the top caps to bleed the shocks things went a lot smoother. Needless to say, the shocks are incredibly smooth when built.