NGL, this entry was a little more difficult to write.

Not because the Victory Magnum is a bad car. Far from it.

It’s just that there were a lot of familiar experiences here, especially after building the nostalgic Premium Magnum Saber right before this one. Same Magnum family. Same Super II chassis. Same familiar colors.

How much more could I possibly say about another Super II Magnum?

Turns out, quite a bit.

Because building these two cars back to back gave me something I hadn’t really experienced before.

I got to see progression.

For the first time, I wasn’t just building another Tamiya. I was getting a small peek into the decisions that turned one Magnum into the next.

Going into the next chapter of the Magnum family, the Victory Magnum immediately looked familiar.

Red, white and blue. Those iconic Magnum flames. Even the box felt like I was looking at the Magnum Saber after it had gone through some sort of Pokémon evolution.

But there was something written on the box that I hadn’t seen before.

Carbon Super II Chassis.

Carbon? Now what could that mean?

Thankfully, I didn’t have to wonder for very long because the side of the box basically answered my question.

And then gave me another surprise.

Wait. This thing is reinforced with carbon fiber?

Then I noticed the tires. Instead of the smooth rubber tires I had gotten used to seeing, Victory Magnum came with these chunky, grooved ones.

I’d never seen anything like them on one of my cars before. Between the reinforced material and those tires, this thing suddenly felt less like a little race car and more like an off-roader.

Naturally, I wanted to build it immediately. And this is where I realized something else had changed.

Not the car. Me.

At this point in my Tamiya journey, I’d started timing myself whenever I built a new kit just to see if I was actually getting any faster.

Victory Magnum became my fastest build yet.

It definitely helped that Super II is such a simple chassis, especially after literally just building another one. But I also realized I wasn’t looking at the instructions at all anymore.

I recognized the pieces.

I knew where the gears went. I knew which screws I needed.

Even installing the rollers had become almost automatic, which is funny considering how much time those stupid little things used to take me. There was a point when just trying to hold a roller, spacer, screw and nut together felt like microsurgery.

Now?

While admiring the finished chassis, though, I started noticing why this Super II felt different from the Magnum Saber I had just built.

It felt sturdier. Super II may already be an evolution of the older Super 1 design, but there are still parts of it that feel pretty light and flexible in your hands. With the Victory Magnum’s reinforced chassis, I felt a little more confident handling it.

Then there were those chunky grooved tires. The whole thing just had a more substantial feel to it than the Saber.

Same basic chassis. Completely different personality.

I finished the cowl, applied the stickers and suddenly realized something ridiculous.

I was done. Under an hour.

Eleven entries ago, I was figuring out how gears worked.

Now I was speedrunning the build.

And because I finished so early, I had plenty of time to do what any normal 30-year-old man would do.

I brought out my other Magnums and started comparing them.

I had recently built the Magnum Saber and Beat Magnum, so I finally had three generations sitting in front of me.

I put batteries in them, ran each one in my hand, picked them up, compared their weight, looked underneath them, compared the cowls, compared the chassis.

And somewhere during all of this, I stopped looking at them as three separate toys. They started looking like a timeline.

Victory Magnum is kind of the awkward middle child of the three. Or maybe the middle evolution of a Pokémon.

Magnum Saber is the one everyone recognizes. Beat Magnum is the sleeker, more evolved form that came later. Victory sits between them.

And that’s exactly what makes it interesting. Put it beside Magnum Saber and you can start seeing all these little changes.

The body became more angular. There are more openings for air to pass through. The spoiler got shorter. The whole thing looks sharper and more aggressive.

Even at the rear, something had changed.

One of my favorite weird details about Magnum Saber was that its rear rollers were attached to the body itself.

Victory Magnum moves away from that. The rollers now live on a proper rear setup attached to the chassis, something that feels completely normal to me after building modern Mini 4WDs.

But seeing the two cars beside each other made me realize that at some point, that had to become normal.

Somebody had to make that change. And then I looked at Beat Magnum.

Suddenly, I could see where all of this was going. Beat takes that same idea and pushes it further. A more modern chassis. A sharper body. More aerodynamic-looking lines. A design that feels much closer to the Mini 4WDs I started this journey with.

Although I do have one complaint.

Why does Victory Magnum have white wheels?!

The green mags are iconic to the Magnum line and I’m definitely missing them here. Thankfully, Beat Magnum eventually corrected this historical injustice.

But sitting there with all three cars in front of me, I realized Victory Magnum had taught me something I wasn’t expecting.

Magnum Saber made me think about my own history. Victory Magnum made me think about Tamiya’s.

It sits in this strange middle ground where you can still clearly see the car that came before it, while little pieces of what came afterward are beginning to appear.

And maybe that’s why I struggled to write about it at first.

Victory Magnum didn’t give me the emotional gut punch of building my childhood car again.

It didn’t introduce me to a completely new chassis either.

Instead, it gave me something quieter.

Context.

Having all three Magnums together felt a little like reading a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Except I already know that’s not true.

There are more Magnums out there. A lot more, unfortunately for my wallet.

More cars to collect. More pieces of the story to put together.

And apparently, more shelf space I need to find.

Historian’s Note

At first, I thought building Victory Magnum immediately after Magnum Saber would make it feel repetitive.

Instead, building them back to back was probably the best way I could have done it.

Same Super II chassis. Same Magnum DNA. But enough little differences that I could actually see how the design was changing.

And now that I also have Beat Magnum sitting beside them, I’m starting to understand why collecting the Magnum line has become so interesting to me.

I’m not just collecting different versions of the same car anymore.

I’m collecting the evolution of one.