Up until this point, Mini 4WD had mostly been a solo hobby for me.

Sure, I’d built the Avante Nero at Brickyard surrounded by other racers. I’d talked to people there, but they were still mostly just strangers.

This time was different. I brought with me my best friend James.

In other words, I had successfully convinced another grown man to build tiny plastic cars with me.

James had never built a Mini 4WD before, so we headed to Brickyard together and picked out our kits.

He chose an MS chassis for his first build, the Dash 3 Shooting Star, which was convenient because literally the day before, I’d built the Avante Nero.

For once, I actually knew what I was doing.

As for me, I already knew roughly what I wanted.

A Magnum.

By this point, I’d started learning more about the history behind Mini 4WD, particularly Bakusou Kyoudai Let’s & Go!!, and there was one family of cars that kept catching my attention. The Magnums.

I’d technically owned a Great Magnum R already, but as I’ve documented before… It’s a bootleg.

And while I’ll eventually hunt down a legitimate Great Magnum R, I wanted my first proper Magnum experience to be something I actually built myself.

The obvious choice would’ve been the classic Magnum Saber on the Super II chassis. I’d already been looking for one. But, I felt like a build I wanted to save for myself.

Today wasn’t really about checking another chassis or car off the list.

Today was about building something with James. I wanted something I’ve built before but still within the Magnum Family. And that’s why I landed on this iconic box.

Underneath it was an AR chassis, making this my second one after the Aero Avante.

Normally, repeating a chassis wouldn’t have been particularly exciting to me at this point. I’d been deliberately trying to experience as many different chassis as possible.

But going back to AR after building so many other cars actually made me appreciate it more.

Everything felt familiar. Motor access from underneath. Battery access without removing the cowl. Parts I immediately recognized.

And somewhere during the build, I noticed something else.

I wasn’t staring at the instructions anymore.

Well… at least not as much.

I still had them beside me but I can autopilot pretty much and help my friend out with his

Looking over at my friend, I didn’t want to build the car for him. Half the fun is figuring the thing out yourself.

So mostly I sat beside him, answered questions, handed him tools, and helped whenever something got particularly fiddly.

Which happened fairly often because James has…

Let’s call them mechanically inconvenient fingers.

By the time he was getting close to finishing his MS chassis, I realized I’d spent so much time helping him that my Beat Magnum was still sitting there half-built.

So when he reached around 90%, I started speedrunning mine.

That might have been the moment I realized just how much more comfortable I’d gotten with these things.

A few builds ago, I was carefully checking the manual every thirty seconds to make sure I hadn’t put a gear in backwards.

Now I could pretty much do this while I’m in a conversation.

I was still very much a beginner.

But apparently… I was now a beginner capable of creating other beginners.

And then I finally got a proper look at the Beat Magnum and oh man, talk about a protagonist’s car

Compared to the older Magnum designs I’d seen, though, the Beat Magnum looked like someone had put the classic protagonist car on a diet.

Lower. Slimmer. Sharper. More angular.

It still had that unmistakable Magnum silhouette, but everything looked more aggressive.

And then there were the wheels.

The green wheels immediately stood out because the front and rear aren’t the same size.

I’d seen slightly different wheel designs before. My Aero Avante, for example, had subtle differences between the front and rear wheels.

But this was much more obvious. The Beat Magnum’s rear wheels were simply bigger.

Did I know what difference that made at the time? Absolutely not.

Did I think it looked cool? Hell yeah!

Of course, there was only one thing left to do. James had finished his car and I’d finished mine.

We were standing beside an actual Mini 4WD track.

I finally had something I hadn’t had with any of my previous builds:

a sparring partner.

So naturally, we raced.

His first-ever Shooting Star against my brand-new Beat Magnum.

We switched them on. Put them on the track.

And…

Well he beat me. Immediately.

My apprentice had surpassed the master in approximately five minutes.

But, I had a lot of fun. This is what this hobby is all about.

As an added bonus, here’s a timelapse of when we built our cars!

Beat Magnum wasn’t the fastest car I’d built. It didn’t introduce me to a new chassis. It wasn’t as mechanically elaborate as Nero or as unfamiliar as the Thunder Shot.

But none of that ended up being the point.

This was the first Mini 4WD I built with a friend.

For the first time, the fun wasn’t just opening a box and figuring out how everything went together. It was handing someone a screwdriver. Watching them struggle with the same tiny parts I’d struggled with. Answering questions I would’ve been asking myself only a few builds ago.

And then getting absolutely smoked by the car I’d just helped him build.

More importantly, Beat Magnum opened another door in my collection.

The Magnum line.

At the time, I thought I was just picking something cool to build alongside my friend. I didn’t know yet just how badly I was about to want the rest of them.

Magnum Saber.

Victory Magnum.

Cyclone Magnum.

Great Magnum R.

You’re all going to be mine someday, and I’ll tell that story when I get there.

Historian’s Note

Beat Magnum comes from the Bakusou Kyoudai Let’s & Go!! lineage and represents one of the later evolutions of Retsu and Go’s iconic Magnum family.

My kit uses the AR chassis, which wasn’t new to me by this point. What was new was finally owning and building a legitimate Magnum myself.

Looking back, that’s probably where the collecting side of this hobby really started getting dangerous.

One Magnum looked cool.

Then I learned there were more.

A lot more.