It was offered to me by the father of Rory Cull, the well known British driver. It took me a while to work out what it was as I hadn't seen anything like it before. The ID clue came from the DNS 17a coding on one of the circuit boards, standing for Devices Networks and Systems which was the Limited Company ran by Nick Marson (reversed letters makes N-O-S-R-A-M). I messaged Nick Marson who subsequently gave me more information on this ESC, it turns out it is quite a special Nosram prototype unit, of which only 6 were made for team drivers, Rory Cull being one of them.
To quote Nick:-
'Definitely a rare find, an important part of Nosram history. There were about 6 made for Rory, Jamie Booth, William and Ben. This was used as a Dominator prototype development model. Team drivers were given one and comments were listened to and incorporated into the final ASIC IC. The ASIC was housed on a thick film hybrid that was mounted at 90° to the main circuit board. It was important to get the circuit right before committing to a custom ASIC ( Application Specific Integrated Circuit).. ASICs were very expensive to tool up. A lot of circuitry was embodied in the ASIC. This allowed for a smaller esc and also stopped people from copying it!'
Nick still has his own example and believes one also went to his son. The circuit board is very elegant when compared to others of this era - a serious and expensive piece of kit back in the day. He told me that the donor 40pin integrated circuit part alone was 200pounds even back then (1989). A very rare find indeed, and he said it was his first attempt at high frequency.
