Rotor Riot Hypetrain Motor Review (BEST FREESTYLE MOTOR)

Choo Choo!

I was super stoked to receive the Rotor Riot Hypetrain motors and couldn’t wait to throw them on a quad and start flying!

I received the motors within 2 weeks to India(super impressive on part of USPS – only issue was that tracking did not update at all, and I just received the motors one fine day).

Inside the package, there were some Rotor Riot stickers – goody! As well as the motors, each packed in a black box. Interestingly, the motors came with the prop nuts screwed on them in advance. Many manufacturers send the prop nuts in a separate bag in the box. The other bag contained 4 bolts for the motor.

First impressions and design

To be completely honest, I was blown away at the quality of the motor. I mean, $25 per motor is quite expensive, but you really do get awesome value for money as far as build quality goes.

The motor is fairly light for its size – it’s a 2306 motor – and just holding it in your hand, you feel like it’s something really solid. On the other end of the spectrum, the Racerstar 2205 motors actually feel cheap in your hand. They’re not bad motors, but they look cheap.

The sexiest part of the motors, by far, was the windings. Man, oh man. The windings are a work of art. I’ve used some decent motors on other builds(Emax RS2205s and DYS SE2205s, as well as BrotherHobby Tornado T1s and Returner R3s) but these windings just shine and the wires look awesome.

These motors are jumping on the trend of not have a bottom part – the bottom of the motor is naked. Then you just have the bell and shaft as you normally would.

There is a bit of debate as to how effective this is – it does save a little weight, because there is less metal being used. Some people think it makes it easier for dirt and mud to get into the windings, but a bad enough crash will most definitely get mud and dirt into the windings anyway.

If anything, I always thought it was a pain to dig dirt out of the bottom part of a motor. At least now that it’s open, some rubbing alcohol and a pick or Q-tip will easily get the dirt out.

Note: I did happen to crash once into mud, and I did get mud into the windings – but I was able to get most of it out very easily using an old toothbrush.

I’ve also had issues where a bad crash dings up the bottom of the motor, which causes it to rub against the windings – not good. Without the bottom, this problem doesn’t exist!

Another interesting design choice with the motor was the mounting holes. Normally, 22xx and 23xx(now 24xx) motors use a 16 x 19 mounting pattern, which means if you mount it one way, the wires will not come out straight. With the 16 x 16 mounting pattern, it’s easy to get the wires to stick out in the right direction.

Most frames have slots instead of holes anyway, which cover both 16 and 19 lengths, so you should not have a problem mounting these motors anywhere.

Note: The FPV Frenzy Stretch 220(my own design) uses 16-19mm slots, in case you were interested 😉

Finally, the top part of the motor has a triangle type design which mimics the Rotor Riot logo. It was a nice design touch, and less metal again means less weight. This was a smart choice and a way to keep the weight down even though the stator was so much bigger.

The wires are 10 or 11cm long, good enough for a 210 or even 220mm frame using a 4-in-1 ESC. I mounted them on my Stretch 220 with a 4-in-1 ESC and had to slightly trim the wires.

Flight characteristics

Note: flight video at the end of this section

These motors are designed to be ideal for freestyle. They’re supposed to be efficient and provide good thrust. I put DAL 5046C Cyclones on my build and took it out for a spin. After some minor tuning adjustments, I did some freestyling.

The Rotor Riot guys were not kidding when they said this was a “freestyle” motor.

Somehow, they’ve managed to design something which is IDEAL for freestyle – below 50% throttle, the quad was docile and tame. As you can see in the video below, when I completely cut the throttle, at idle up speed, the motors were completely silent. That’s amazing!

The lesser lower end power took a while to get used to. My other setups have racing style motors(RS2205S), which have much sharper throttle curves, so I’m used to going a bit faster at lower throttles – you’ll notice this in the video, as low throttle flying will look quite slow.

I have never before had motors which were so smooth at idle up – most of the motors I’ve used(good ones, too) always have some sort of noise coming at idle.

Speaking of smooth, there is little to no noise – I set up the Betaflight Dynamic Notch filter, and set the low pass filters to 0, and the motors were barely warm, even after some aggressive punchouts. I even increased the D gains on pitch and roll for some added smoothness, and the motors were still barely warm.

My Emax RS2205S, which I have on my other setup would get borderline hot for the notch filter. These motors don’t even notice it.

Once you’re above 50%, there is a sudden burst of power. You’ll see this in the video as I launch over the tree. Approaching the tree, you’ll see that I’m going quite slowly, and with just a tiny blip of throttle, I’ll be over it. This is awesome for freestyling, because the lower amp draw and power on lower throttles saves a lot of battery power – and just a tiny blip of throttle will get you that extra big boost of power you need to complete a maneuver.

For extreme proximity flying, these motors are ideal. If you’re flying around tight trees, you want to be in full control of your speed. If you go too fast, you’re going to crash – these motors will help get that smooth, buttery flight that you see in the pros videos – you know, the ones where you can’t believe they’re actually flying 5 inch rigs on 4S!

‘That being said, these are FREESTYLE ONLY motors. I would not recommend trying to race with them!

Here’s the flight video, with two bonus crashes – one that destroyed my Runcam Split, but the motors were completely fine. Even though the Split is hard mounted into the frame, there is very little to no jello whatsoever. Betaflight 3.2 and Hypetrain motors are really magic! I have left the audio untouched so you can hear the motors, too.