I raced the crap out of a Hotshot for many years. They kinda sucked due to gear diffs and shaft drive, so unless the rear end was sliding, the front end was pushing. If you had enough power to swing the rear end out it was a handful. Thorpe made ball diffs so you could tune the front/rear torque bias. That finally made the difference and made it competitive with the Yokomo chain- and later belt-drive cars with slipper clutches in the front end.
Mine ended up a "Red Hot Hotshot" by using all the parts available from Hot Trick Racing. It looked something like this, but this one doesn't have the full kit: