Ugly Duckling

This was hard to do... I've taken the track apart in preparation for some work in the loft.  I'm having a couple of Velux windows fitted to improve the light and ventilation, and I also intend to paint the exposed brick of the party wall.  So the table is currently looking pretty bare...

...and here's all the scenery in the spare room...

Hopefully, there will be some photos of the transformation in a couple of weeks.

30 Years of the NSCC

The third and final purchase at this weekend's slot car festival was the car commissioned by the National Scalextric Collector's Club to commemorate its 30 year anniversary.

The car chosen is a Jaguar XKR GT3 in British Racing Green with black bonnet and rear wing, plus NSCC logos and the Jaguar cat image picked out in gold.  The car comes in a special presentation box with the limited edition numbered card and a booklet detailing all of the special cars commissioned by the NSCC over the years.

Bullitt

I went to the UK Slot Car Festival today with Andy and bought (and sold!) some more cars.  I'd been interested in Pioneer slot cars since trying out their 68 Mustang Notchbacks at a show last year.  The Notchbacks are nice but what I really wanted was this pair...

... Steve McQueen as Bullitt driving the 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT...

...and the assassins driving the black Dodge Charger R/T.

These cars famously raced around the streets of San Francisco in the 1968 film "Bullitt".  They are highly detailed cars.  The assassin even has his gun half-covered by his coat...

...and it's a pretty good likeness of Steve McQueen...

They are both very quick and make another great pair to race on the Highwood Circuit - although no petrol station for the Charger to crash into and explode!

Reach for the Skylines

A trio of very fast Nissan Skylines.  These are manufactured by HPI Racing - currently the only slot car they make, the rest of their extensive range is all radio-controlled cars.  The Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R is one of the iconic Japanese supercars and the Skyline models have always showcased the latest driving technologies that Nissan engineers could fit into a road-going car.  The GT-R continued this tradition, with up to 500 horsepower coming out of a 2.8-litre, dual-turbo 6-cylinder engine.

I bought the red and white models a few weeks back, and after a thorough testing with Stuart this weekend, I decided to get a third for a bit more variety and as a backup.  These cars are very fast and stable, with high levels of detail.  The exterior details like radiators, disc brakes, brake calipers, mirrors, wings, exhaust, headlight buckets, mirrors, tow hooks and radio antennae combine (along with lots of decals) to make the models extremely realistic. Inside is a fully painted and detailed interior, steering wheel, and dashboard.

Scalextric Fighting Knights

Posted on the SlotCarIllustrated Forum yesterday, this entertaining article about a failed product development is well worth a read...

Slot lubrication

The track has been installed for well over a year now and it's never had a thorough clean.  In recent months, I have been following a long thread on SlotCarIllustrated about an Australian lubricant called Inox.  Racers have been claiming amazing things about this stuff - so much that Inox themselves now have picked up on the slot car market on their own website - and I thought it was about time I gave it a try.  It's not available in the UK but didn't cost much to get it shipped from Australia.

I made a cleaning tool by glueing a couple of old Scalextric guides (without the metal brades) into a piece of wood, so that I could easily guide a cloth sprayed in Inox along the track rails.

You can see from the photo how much oxidation came off the track.  The rails didn't look too dirty (the loft isn't damp so no serious corrosion) but the cloth was black by the time I'd finished both tracks.

In cleaning and protecting the tracks, the Inox has significantly improved the connection between the car braids and the rails.  This leads to noticeably faster driving and quicker lap times.  I estimate this has taken a second off the quickest cars' laps, and more off the slower cars.  Certainly I found I had to be more careful with the trigger than I have in recent months.  A great improvement.

Aston vs Ferrari

In 'Goldfinger', the henchmen drive a Mercedes-Benz 180.  I wanted something more special than that to race against the DB5.  In the early scenes of 'GoldenEye', Bond races the Aston against a Ferrari 355 Spider driven by Xenia Onatopp.

I'm not a big fan of 80s and 90s Ferraris so figured something more classic should race against my DB5.  A car I love from the early sixties with a good racing pedigree is the Ferrari 250 GTO.

This car represents chassis no 4399 as raced by Mike Parkes at the Coppa Inter Europa race at Monza, Italy in September 1963.  The car finished 1st in class and 2nd overall, losing to an Aston Martin appropriately enough, one of the two DP214 prototypes.  I found this newspaper clipping of the Ferrari in the actual race.

I bought this car to cheer me up after being too ill to visit the annual Slotcar swapmeet at Swindon with Andy.

The cars look great together - almost too good to race, but I don't want to become one of those types of collectors.  These are slot cars after all and I've got plenty of superglue!