Hello oh wise ones! I need some help badly. I’d really appreciate any suggestions as I am at that point now after 2+ hours of tinkering and racking my brain that I am feeling completely defeated.

So, we were playing with the nearly new XMAXX 8S (Snap on Van edition) although I don’t run the snap on body, I just have a normal xMaxx body on it. Anyway, we played with it today, it’s cold out here, like 10 degrees. We played for about 20 mins then brought it inside and cleaned it up, it had a little snow in the crevices and so I used compressed air and blew it all out and then cleaned it really well like I normally do.

3-4 hours later after we charged the batteries (2x 3s 5000mah traxxas batteries) we put the batteries back in and turned it on and immediately after pressing the on button the red temperature light was on constant to indicate thermal shut down stage 1, and sure enough it was only running at 50% power) so I turned it off, checked connections, and then decided to use my phone and the traxxas link app to check temps, it was at 40 degrees F.... but it said I needed an update to firmware. So I ran the update which took 15 mins or so. Turned it on and off and......

GREAT instead of fixing the issue it made it worse, now the temp light is flashing red. Indicating thermal shut down level 2 or full shut down. So no throttle.

What is going on? I took the ESC out of the car and made sure there wasn’t any ice or debris in the fan, if you’ve taken the VXL-8s out of the xMaxx you’ll know when you take it out it opens up and you can get to the little fan and take it out and see it’s nice and clean, but I still used compressed air to make sure everything was dry and clean, let it warm up in the house.... put it all back together and still when I turn it on, everything cold or room temp, it immediately as soon as I push the on button, the red temp light starts flashing to indicate thermal shut down. How can it be in thermal shut down when it’s own sensors are clearly reading 40 degrees F as evidenced by the traxxas link app??? It’s not a bad sensor or else it would give no reading but that’s not the case!

I mean I know the traxxas VXL stuff is garbage but I thought the newest 8s one was supposed to be better, I’d understand if I ran it super hard on 8s and it let out the white smoke... but that didn’t happen. It was fine. It never got hot!!! We just drove around lightly today. No craziness. Temps never got above 80 on the app.

This is driving me nuts. Am I missing something? Is there an easy fix? Did I mess something up when I took it out of the xMaxx? Did I accidentally mess up a wire or something. I don’t think so, I am pretty well versed in electronics repair but I don’t want to void my warranty by taking apart the ESC.

So yeah. Help me. If you can. Please. Thank you.