A 1/43 Supra drift car with a gyro, ready to run for ¥8,690

The news post from ラジコンもんちぃ, published October 18, 2026, reports that ハイテックマルチプレックスジャパン released a 1/43 scale mini RC drift car named Supra on Saturday, October 17. Credited to the maker, the post states four things about the car itself:

• it is 1/43 scale, described as palm-size
• it carries a gyro
• it is 4WD
• it is presented for countersteered drift running indoors

The post then directs readers to the product page for details and color variations. That is all the post itself says, and the maker's product page answers most of what it leaves out.

The car is a Toyota-licensed model with a suggested retail price of ¥8,690 including tax, in red, yellow, white and pink; the pink car carries the livery of the drift team 1087X. It is sold ready to run: the box holds the car, a 2.4 GHz full-proportional transmitter, pylons, a screwdriver, a USB charging cable, spare tires and a manual, and the transmitter needs two AA batteries that are not included. The car is about 11.6 cm long and runs a 716 motor, a 2 g steering servo and a 3.7 V 380 mAh Li-ion battery, with LED lights; the page quotes about 30 minutes of running from a 50-minute charge, a range of up to about 50 m, and several cars running at once on 2.4 GHz.

What the page still does not give is the tire compound — only that the drift tires suit a desk or a wooden floor and that the spare set grips harder — the gearing, the ESC, or any distribution outside Japan.

At 1/10, the combination of all-wheel drive and a drift chassis belongs to an earlier chapter. Counter-steer — CS — meant an AWD car geared so the rear wheels turned faster than the fronts, expressed as a CS ratio, and that approach sat at the center of the hobby before RWD chassis took the competitive ground. AWD at 1/10 now reads as legacy or entry-level, and the scene says which it is describing.

The temptation is to map that history straight onto a 1/43 car and call it a throwback. The announcement does not support the move. It says 4WD and it says gyro; it does not say whether the rear axle is geared to turn faster than the front, and it gives no ratio. Those are the terms that would settle whether the word CS applies here at all, and they are absent from both the post and the maker's page.

What the post does assert is the pairing itself: the gyro is presented as part of what makes a countersteered drift possible in a room, on a machine that fits in a hand. At 1/10 a gyro is standard equipment on an RWD car — it reads yaw and feeds correction to the steering servo faster than a person can — and it is a setup part, not an assist and not an autopilot. The driver still initiates, picks the line and manages the trigger. Nothing in this announcement claims otherwise for the 1/43 car.

It would be easy to file this as a turn in the hobby. The evidence does not reach that far. One release, reported the day after it happened, tells us a maker thinks there is an audience for a gyro-equipped drift car small enough to run on a living-room floor. It tells us nothing about a format, a series, a spec tire or a track surface, because the announcement raises none of those.

The part of the story worth watching is surface and shell culture rather than the chassis. The 1/10 scene organized itself around tracks — P-tile, carpet, polished concrete — and around bodies with a style attached to them: JDM, kaido racer, stance, team livery. Small-scale drifting has its own version of that conversation. Whether a 1/43 car grows one, or stays a self-contained product with factory colors, is not something an October 2026 release post can answer.

For a 1/10 driver, nothing here displaces anything. The RWD chassis on P-tile, the gyro gain dialed from the transmitter, the hard plastic tire matched to the floor: all of that is untouched by a palm-size 4WD car with its own remit. The interesting question is simply whether the small end of the hobby keeps producing cars that behave like drift cars rather than toys, and that is a question answered over several releases, not one.

The release was reported by ラジコンもんちぃ: the 1/43 Supra announcement post, dated October 18, 2026, credited to the maker. The detail and the four colors are on ハイテックマルチプレックスジャパン's product page, and the distributor's release ran on PRESSNOW on October 15, 2026.