Scalextric TVR Tuscan 400R

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if my very first slot car had not been this front-engined machine.

The track width was narrow, the ride height wasn’t especially low, the full interior gave it a high center of gravity, and on top of that, it was front-motored.

To be honest, it was not an easy car to drive.

Before long, the mirrors broke off. Then the rear wing broke too. Being a beginner, I was obsessed with repairing everything “properly” and “strongly,” so I repeatedly repaired the parts using acrylic powder and methyl methacrylate ― sold commercially as a Plastic Repair Kit.

Controlling the amount of liquid hardener dropped onto the powder was difficult, and the repaired bases of the mirrors and wing gradually became ugly swollen lumps. The solvent would unexpectedly flow into surrounding areas as well, dissolving parts of the livery and slowly turning the body sticky and messy.

As the paint dissolved, the windows became cloudy and dirty too. Meanwhile, the tires accumulated the peculiar glue residue typical of commercial wood tracks, and eventually even using a lint roller to clean the tire surface no longer restored any grip at all.

Back then, I had no idea that simply cleaning the tire surface with a strong solvent such as automotive Brake & Parts Cleaner could easily restore the grip of the rubber.

At that point, the car became impossible to drive without crashing, and before long it had effectively become junk.

Because the car carried so many memories for me, I bought fresh examples of it two or three different times over the years, and each time I carefully prepared them into properly race-ready “hot” cars using whatever skills I had at that stage of my life. And yet, somehow, I never managed to achieve a result that truly satisfied me.

To call them “junk” may actually sound worse than they really were. The only serious problem was that the rear axle crown gears had missing teeth, so I replaced them with Slot.it crowns and axle shafts. Since the Tuscan also has a rather narrow track width, I fitted hubless CB Design wheels as well.

Using my usual approach for preparing a non-magnet car, I replaced the guide with a Ninco guide, removed the traction magnet, shaved the underside of the full interior tray to create additional space, and added ballast weight.

The front stub axles were fixed at an appropriate negative camber angle, the edges of the front tires were rounded off, and the rear tires were replaced with N22s and trued.

And when we finally drove them, my wife and I were actually able to race the two cars against each other normally.

Certainly, my ability to prepare slot cars has improved over the years ― but naturally, after countless official races and friendly matches against many different racers, both of us had also become significantly better drivers.

And honestly, that alone made me completely satisfied.

FLY Dodge Viper GTS-R

The two cars appear to have been produced at almost exactly the same time, but ― very much in typical old FLY fashion ― quality-control issues resulted in a significant difference in their overall condition. Structurally they were identical ― both third-generation FLY Vipers ― and yet the chassis rigidity between the two cars was completely different.

The blue A206 chassis was so soft that it would actually flex enough to alter the wheelbase under load. As a result, the pinion at the end of the driveshaft would move around fore-and-aft as well as side-to-side, and combined with the peaky high-rpm characteristics of the motor, it became extremely prone to stripping crown gears.

So the very first thing I did was reinforce the overly flexible chassis by adding roughly 2 mm piano-wire braces inside the side sills on both sides.

The green A209 used the same chassis design, and the chassis itself was certainly not especially rigid to begin with, but this one didn’t require additional bracing at all. Perhaps the plastic compound itself was somehow different from the A206 chassis.

On both cars, the stock wheels and axles actually seemed perfectly usable without replacing everything with high-performance aftermarket parts from companies like Slot.it. I simply fixed the front stub axles at an appropriate negative camber angle, rounded the edges of the front tires, and replaced the rear tires with N22s before truing them.

Driving them now, it’s hard to believe how terrifying they felt back when I had only just entered the slot-car hobby around 2005–2008. Back then, they honestly felt almost undrivable. But today, they no longer feel particularly intimidating.

Even the peaky motor characteristics turned out not to be that difficult, as long as I was mentally prepared for them beforehand.

Maybe that simply comes from having spent the last twenty years wrestling with far more troublesome cars.

Well… I suppose that’s what experience points are.

That said, I should probably add one thing: even today, I still think these are extremely difficult and temperamental cars for beginners. Modern slot-car racing now offers an abundance of excellent tires, convenient tuning parts, and specialized tools compared with back then, but even so, these remain cars from an era when you truly had to work on them properly to make them run well.

Ninco Lotus Exige GT3

As for the appearance of the Ninco Exige itself, the body shape is not really a problem. In fact, I find it rather charming. However, the wheel and tire dimensions ― along with the track width ― are completely wrong. The tires have an excessively large outer diameter, and the shoulders are too square and too wide, making the compact little Exige look more like a sand buggy.

To improve that, I narrowed both front and rear track widths and lowered the ride height slightly. I think this helped restore at least some of the compact, tightly packed proportions the real car should have.

As for the driving itself, it remains exactly as I described at the beginning: somehow simply uninspiring. I never get the sense that it is on the verge of becoming a truly excellent car, yet the charming bodywork prevents me from giving up on it.

In any case, I believe the real weakness lies in the rear half of the chassis design. In order to reproduce the Exige’s adorable coke-bottle waistline, the chassis width was heavily constrained, leaving virtually no way to secure sufficient rigidity between the motor mount and the rear axle bracket.

On top of that, Ninco’s traditional two-post body mounting system ― one at the front and one at the rear ― is fundamentally unsuitable for proper roll control.

I always think the same thing about body posts: every car should use a four-point mounting system with two posts at the front and two at the rear. Otherwise there is barely any meaningful room for chassis tuning at all.

If I were truly serious about improving the handling, I would probably need to cut away the diffuser at the rear of the chassis and glue it directly to the body, fabricate an entirely new aluminum chassis plate from scratch, and at the very least convert the rear body mounting to a proper two-post arrangement.

But originally, all I really wanted was the chance to tinker with one of Ninco’s charming little Lotus models with their cute, compact proportions.

And really, this tendency is not limited to this particular car. Whenever I come across a slot car whose stock form somehow completely fails to capture the appeal of the real machine, I instinctively feel the urge to tweak it a little and see whether I can bring out the attractiveness that should have been there in the first place.

That is really all there is to it.

FLY Panoz LMP-1 Roadster S with Olifer 3DP-Chassis and ThunderSlot Motor Pod

The FLY Panoz Roadster S follows the same FR layout as the real car. For a conventional front-engined slot car, it actually runs fairly well — as long as the magnet is left in place. But compared with Slot.it Group C and LMP cars, its performance is honestly nowhere near competitive.

That felt too sad for a car which, in the real world, had managed to defeat machines like the Audi R8 LMP and BMW V12 LMR from time to time.

So over the years I tried all kinds of things ― eventually even relocating the rear motor support while retaining the original front-motor inline layout in order to install a Slot.it Flat-6 motor.

But the stock spring-type driveshaft joint kept failing under torsional load. I lost three of them, all eventually twisting themselves apart under power.

Then I ran into another problem: genuine replacement joints had become extremely difficult to obtain. So, with no other choice, I had no choice but to commission custom-made stainless-steel replacements from a spring manufacturer, built to my exact specifications. Even so, four out of the five one-off pieces eventually twisted themselves apart as well.

At that point, I finally gave up on the idea of a high-powered FR-layout slot car.

Then, after leaving the project untouched for almost ten years, I recently decided to revisit it as part of my “lighten the burdens of my heart before I die” campaign.

Once I fully understood that the real weak point of a high-powered front-engined car was the driveshaft joint itself, I remembered that I had actually purchased two Olifer 3DP chassis for the Panoz back in 2018.

There were two versions available: one for Slot.it mounts and another for ThunderSlot mounts. Choosing between them was difficult. I was already familiar with Slot.it motor mounts, while I had never used ThunderSlot mounts before.

But by that point ThunderSlot had already been around for about three years, and the worldwide consensus was becoming clear: ThunderSlot was simply on another level.

So I bought the Olifer chassis designed for the ThunderSlot motor mount, along with a ThunderSlot anglewinder mount… and then let them sit unused for eight years.

Eventually I abandoned my attachment to the FR layout and rebuilt the car as an anglewinder.

The result was astonishing.

The car suddenly developed unbelievable road holding, almost like it had magnets installed. I even checked it on a setup plate because I suspected magnetic downforce, but there was proper ground clearance everywhere. So rather than motor magnetism, I think it’s simply the characteristic of the ThunderSlot mount itself.

Man… this thing is seriously impressive. I was completely prejudiced against it for no reason.

Incidentally, for the suspension I used foam rather than metal springs.

And during setup, the following video from the NorCal Slot Car Scene YouTube channel was extremely helpful:

NorCal Slot Car Scene

FLY Porsche 911GT1 Evo／Gunnar-Porsche G99 with Olifer 3DP-Chassis

The colorful “Hole in the Wall Camp / Victory Junction Gang Camp” car had originally been a gift from a friend many years ago.

On the real car, the front tires had an extremely low-profile, wafer-thin appearance.

But on FLY’s slot car, the thick square-shouldered front tires protruded awkwardly beyond the front fenders, making the car look so clumsy that it barely resembled a 911GT1 at all.

For a long time, that was one of the main reasons why FLY’s 911GT1 remained unpopular. The first thing I wanted to fix was exactly that.

So my first step was to give the front tires a much lower-profile, flatter appearance, then trim the wheel hubs to reduce the track width enough to tuck the wheels properly inside the front fenders.

At first I continued running the car on the original FLY chassis.

But after discovering Olifer’s 3D-printed chassis, I became curious and decided to build one in anglewinder configuration.

The improvement was substantial.

The car suddenly became genuinely enjoyable to drive, and I immediately wanted a second one so my wife and I could race together.

So I tracked down another Gunnar-Porsche G99 ― the “Honor the Florida Mako Fighter Squadron” version ― and built it to the same specification.

The differences in tire wear and tire decals simply reflect the fact that the two cars were built at different times.

Mechanically and performance-wise, however, they are completely identical.

Scalextric McLaren F1 GTR with Olifer 3DP-Chassis

For decades, British miniature brands such as Airfix, Corgi, and Matchbox had a reputation for being exceptionally good at capturing proportions, and Scalextric’s F1-GTR clearly inherited that same strength.

I compared it side-by-side with older offerings from Ninco, MR Slotcar, and RevoSlot, weighing overall body proportions, chassis construction, and price.

For me, Scalextric offered the best overall balance.

And honestly, the long-term availability and accessibility of spare parts is another hugely important factor that should not be underestimated.

For a while I simply ran it in standard non-magnet form, but eventually I wanted to build something capable of racing alongside my FLY 911GT1 using an Olifer 3D-printed chassis.

Vintage WRC Cars (5) NINCO

＜Citroën C4 WRC＞
Judging by the era of the real car, I suppose this was released around 2009 or 2010.

By that time, my interest in the WRC had already faded considerably. Around me, most slot car racing activity had shifted toward anglewinder JGTC cars and Megane Trophy racing instead.

I first became interested in the C4 while searching for a suitable rival for the unexpectedly successful Scalextric Lancer Evo 7 I had prepared earlier.

This was before I discovered the Ford Focus WRC 2001, and since my collection contained very few Citroëns, I began looking into either the Xsara or the C4.

Among the various Ninco C4 versions, this Red Bull car was apparently the only one equipped with large-diameter wheels as standard.

I knew, of course, that Sébastien Loeb had been dominating the WRC during that era, but beyond that I had no particularly deep attachment to the car itself. It was a fairly casual choice.


＜Mitsubishi Lancer WRC04＞
Looking at the base of the crystal case, this one was labeled “2005 Limited Edition,” although I do not remember ever seeing it back when I first entered the slot car hobby.

Perhaps I simply had no interest in cars like this at the time.

After obtaining the Citroën C4 WRC, however, I reconsidered things and decided that the Ford Focus WRC 2001 was ultimately a more suitable counterpart for the Scalextric Lancer Evo 7.

That left the C4 without a partner, so I searched for something appropriate and eventually settled on this Lancer WRC04.

Both the C4 and the Lancer WRC04 received the usual preparation work: the magnets were removed and ballast weight added, the rear tires were replaced with Paul Gage PGT urethanes and trued, Z-Machine LED lighting was installed, and finally Patto tire decals were applied to complete the cars.