Slots Cars are Back!

Every Christmas season (as well as at birthdays and other gift-giving occasions) many parents face the task of choosing a first slot car race set for their children. Most of them are completely new to the slot car hobby; all they know is that a race set is the "gotta have" item on their son or daughter's wish list. In addition, a growing number of parents want to get their kids into slot cars as a means of prying them away from the TV, computer, and video games. They want to guide them toward a more hands-on, real-world, interactive pastime. If any of the above describes your situation Electric Dreams can help.

First, you need to determine whether your child is ready to race slot cars. Most kids have the necessary coordination, attention span, and general level of understanding by the age of six, but individuals can vary widely. Some younger children can handle it, and some older children may have problems if they are a little behind the curve in their development. If your child has the normal skills of a six-year-old he should be fine.

It's a good idea to provide some oversight and assistance to begin with, and in the process you will see very quickly whether
your child is ready. If not, you can always put their slot cars away for a few months and bring it out later. By age eight almost all children are ready to race with little or no help needed. Most kids pick it up very rapidly. We like to tell parents of newborns that if they buy a race set, take it home and set it up, and practice an hour a day until the child is ready to race at age six, they may then be able to stay ahead of him for a week or so.

The main goal is to make sure your child (or a beginner of any age) has a fun and satisfying first experience with the slot car hobby. More than anything else this will ensure that the beginner sticks with it and turns it into a long-term hobby with all the good things that flow from it.

You've bought that first slot car race set and expanded it into a good-sized layout. You've equipped your track with a lap counter so you can tell who's ahead. You're having a great time running cars on your track, and you have a group of friends or family members who are enjoying it with you. Then somebody says, "Why don't we run some real races?" Real races. That means racing rules. And you have no idea what they should be. In particular, you don't know how to ensure that the racing stays simple, easy, inexpensive, fair, and above all, fun. Actually, it's not hard at all and we'll tell you here what you need to know to get a good start.

First of all, this article is about conventional slot car racing, the kind in which each car runs on its own lane and the number of cars you can race at one time equals the number of lanes on your track. There is another, newer form of the hobby, called digital, in which electronic circuitry in the cars and controllers allows as many as six or even eight cars to run on a two-lane track, changing lanes to overtake and pass. Digital slot car racing is growing in popularity but is still a relatively small part of the market. Many of the basic principles in this article also apply to digital racing and all the cars mentioned can be converted without too much difficulty. However, the specifics of the article all refer to conventional racing.

Everything you do, from a technical standpoint, should be intended to make slot car racing as easy, inexpensive and, of course, fun as possible and to give every participant a genuine chance to be competitive. The place to start is to put some intelligent restrictions on car preparation, controllers, track design, and power supplies. You don't want your racers to have to spend long hours at the workbench and large sums of money just to have a chance at winning. You want it to be fun, not work.

However, you probably have already seen that there are different skill levels and racing preferences represented in your group of enthusiasts. Also, you don't want to race the same cars all the time. Variety is, after all, the spice of life. So, here are three racing classes designed to provide a variety of challenges and performance levels while still keeping things simple and keeping costs down.

There are literally tons of place online to check out what's new in the world of slot cars. And let me tell you, a lot has changed since they (slot cars) were cool in the 60's and early 70's.

Slot cars today are very high tech. There are even digital, computer controlled controllers that will allow multiple cars to run in the same track.

Here are some of the newest slot cars available from the online site Electric Dreams:

New Items In Stock:

Fly 88290 Porsche 935K3, LeMans 1980.  $74.99

Fly 88305 Lola T70 white kit.  $44.99

Slot It SICA06D.  Sauber-Mercedes "Circuit board".  $54.99

Slot It SICA10B McLaren F1 GTR, Fina, LeMans 1997.  $54.99

Fly 99032 Ferrari 512S, Playboy, boxed. $89.99

 

Fly 99070 Marcos LM600, PPG.  $74.99

If you could poll the entire world's population of racing fans and ask them "What is the most beautiful and charismatic race car ever built?" a great many of them would vote for the 1962 / 63 Ferrari 250 GTO. There is a mystique about this car, a timelessly perfect blend of form and function that transcends technology and enters the realm of pure art. The GTO has captivated car lovers for more than 40 years now, and its reputation, founded on legendary competition successes in the days before wings, slicks, and ground effects and endlessly renewed by its continuing presence in vintage racing, just keeps on growing. Whole generations of motorsports enthusiasts, seeing and hearing it at speed for the first time, have fallen in love with it on the spot.

The GTO's design took advantage of a provision of the FIA GT class rules that allowed special bodywork to be fitted to production GT cars. The resulting car could end up looking quite different from its assembly-line siblings and still be considered the same make and model under the rules. The manufacturer was supposed to build a specified minimum number of cars with the revised bodywork, but that provision of the rules was widely winked at. Ironically, this paragraph in the rule book was the same one Carroll Shelby used to get his Cobra Daytona Coupes into the GT class in 1964 and beat Ferrari for the world GT Championship in 1965, but when the 250 GTO appeared those events were still two and three years in the future.

The GTO's shape is a quintessentially Italian distillation of aesthetics and the racing world's then nascent understanding of aerodynamics. It represents, perhaps, the apex of a brief, shining era in race car design that flourished just before the tyranny of the wind tunnel descended upon the world of high-performance automobiles and turned them into something more closely resembling aircraft, both aesthetically and technologically. The low, sloping nose, Kamm tail with its perfectly rendered spoiler, and the various vents in the bodywork came together to define for decades to come the very picture of what a fast car ought to look like. For many it still does.

One thing that has helped to keep the original 250 GTO so special is that, unlike its equally iconic contemporaries, the Cobra and the Ford GT40, it has largely resisted, with some help from the Ferrari legal department, attempts by kit car makers to clone it. Aside from a run of Datsun 240Z - based fiberglass caricatures the only real cloning of the GTO to date has been done by rebodying actual Ferrari 250 GT chassis, which is essentially how the original GTOs were built. Some of these replicas were so faithful to the original it was hard to tell them apart without an in-depth expert inspection, but there were never going to be very many of them because the supply of chassis is so limited. Even that effort succeeded only in duplicating the original in detail whereas some of the Cobra and GT40 clones and recreations are, in significant ways, better cars than the originals. In any case, there has never been a horde of GTO kit cars and low-buck replicas, so when you see the unmistakable shape of a Ferrari 250 GTO you are much more likely to be looking at the real thing. For that reason you are far less likely to see one, not to mention own one, except in miniature.

Which brings us to the slot car track (I hope you knew I'd get us there sometime) and Fly's new 250 GTO. For starters, there has already been Internet comment about the lack of Ferrari logos on the car's fenders. The car is a model of the GTO raced at LeMans in 1962 by Leon Dernier and Jean Blaton, who raced under the pseudonym of "Beurlys". The car is modeled exactly as it looked at LeMans and the absence of the Ferrari trademark from its fenders has nothing to do with licensing issues. The name Ferrari does appear on the bottom of the chassis and the famous prancing horse emblem is part of the chrome trim on the car's front air intake. Neither would be there if there were any significant licensing issues. The yellow dots and stripe were most likely identifying marks applied by the team to make it easier to identify its car at a distance in a field with numerous red Ferraris. This was a common practice then and continues to this day.

Here's a shot of a diecast model of the car and one of the real thing.

All that aside, the Fly slot car model's appearance is fully worthy to represent one of the greatest cars of all time. This is not to say it's perfect, but it's a huge step forward in overall build quality in general and paint quality in particular as compared to most of Fly's efforts over the past few years. The paint, especially, is impressive. It's uniformly smooth and glossy with not a speck, run, or orange peel to be found, something almost unheard of on a Fly car. And the shade of red is to die for, a blood-red hue that screams "Ferrari!" The tampo-stamping is sharp and opaque.

I did find one significant tampo stamping flaw in my two review cars, however. The windshield and window frames are picked out in silver, but the silver does not come all the way down to the glass. You can see red between the silver and the clear parts. This is only apparent upon close examination, especially under magnification, and appears to be common to all the cars, but the obsessively anal among us may be put off. A fastidious modeler could probably take the car apart and fix the problem with silver paint and a fine brush, but most purchasers probably won't care or even notice. This is still a super cool slot car!

All the various body openings are faithfully rendered, including the three "nostrils" in the top of the nose. Fly does need to pay a bit more attention to what's behind the openings, however. The three openings atop this slot cars nose reveal the chrome piece that mounts to the chassis and incorporates the two headlights. The part behind the openings, no doubt, is intended to represent the car's radiator and should, therefore, be painted silver rather than left in the chrome plating. A worse mistake is the omission of any structure behind the vents in the sides of the fenders just forward of the doors. It's possible to look all the way through both sides of the car, which one shouldn't be able to do, revealing nothing at all in between. A couple of squares of styrene sheet, painted black and glued in behind the vents, will fix the problem.

By the way, watch out for the photo-etched hood clips when handling the car. They're sharp. I cut a finger on one of them.

Another problem area is the right windshield wiper, which rides well off the windshield on both review cars. This not only does not look good but also makes the wiper more vulnerable to damage. A fix for the problem is simply to rotate the wipers upward on the windshield, partway through their arc, until they reach a position where both are flat against the glass.

More significant is the misalignment in the fit of the front valence. On both my review cars the part was offset slightly to one side and there was a slight gap between the parts on the left side. The severity of the misfit seems to vary between cars, so this one thing may be worth going through your dealer's stock of the slot cars (if he'll let you) and picking out the best one.

The interior is nicely done with correct seats and instruments, switches, and shift lever. The driver figure, however, is a disappointment. He's a parts bin component, made for use in much newer slot cars and therefore dressed in the kind of bulky firesuit and thick gloves which are common today but still in the future in 1962. The helmet is also of a design not seen until many years later. In addition, the driver is wearing a full 5-point quick-release safety harness. I may be mistaken about this but I believe that in 1962 the GTO was equipped only with a lap belt. The effect is to make the car look like one being campaigned in present-day vintage racing with the upgrades required to comply with current safety rules. It's possible that Fly, in researching the car, had access to one or more GTOs updated in exactly this way and didn't realize that some of the safety features may not have been part of the original fit. That said, the belt assembly, which is a separate part from the driver figure itself, is beautifully done and most likely will be seen on other slot cars where it may be more period-authentic. Those wishing to complete the vintage-racer look need only equip the driver with a full-face helmet and a HANS device to bring him up to the cutting edge of safety. One welcome positive is the excellent fit between the driver's hands and the steering wheel.

The GTO's wheels and tires have also come in for some criticism, at least some of it justified. To begin with, the tires are slicks, definitely out of place on a car from the early 60s. The wheels, though nice looking, do not match the real thing, as seen in the photos below.

The photos speak for themselves.

There have also been complaints that the car rides too high, especially in front. I think there is room for honest disagreement here, as an examination of photos of 1:1 scale GTOs reveals some that do appear to sit lower to the ground than others. Two factors may be at work. First, it's quite possible that the cars may have been set up higher for some circuits than others, especially for races on public roads that may not have been as billiard-table smooth as modern race tracks tend to be. Also, the 250 GTO appeared right at the beginning of an era in which tire construction, widths, and profiles changed rapidly, and changes in tires may have affected the cars' stance. In any case, I lowered the front end of one of the review models by simply shaving about 1/16" off the front body posts, and there's room to lower it even more if needed. While you're working on the body posts, another mod you can do is to reinforce the posts with styrene tubing. I used Evergreen 15/64" o.d. tubing, available at most hobby shops. This will pretty well ensure that you will never have a broken or cracked post to fix. You could get the car still lower by installing lower-profile tires, but if you do you'll have to start trimming off protrusions from the bottom of the chassis to maintain ground clearance.

It's Fly's standard practice to put each slot cars motor in the same general location as the engine on the 1:1 scale car, a policy going all the way back to the first Dodge Viper of 10 years ago. This, of course, allows the models to be made with a full-depth interior. On the GTO, however, the motor seems to be even farther forward than it needs to be. A look through the aforementioned side vents reveals empty space that looks like it could have been used to move the motor farther aft. Whether that would have made it possible to use a solid front axle instead of the none-too popular plastic stub axles remains to be researched for another article.

The front motor does make the car's handling heavily magnet-dependent, and Fly has made sure the rear end stays firmly stuck down by using a very strong neodymium magnet placed just forward of the drive shaft bushing. The result is consistent lap times on the Electric Dreams Scalextric Sport test track in the 4.2-second range with a best time of 4.036. That makes the car about half a second too fast for my scheme of things. My Corvettes lap in the 4.5-second range, and the GTO should be a tenth or two slower. Yes, you read that right. A 250 GTO is actually slower, at least on shorter circuits, than a well-prepared SCCA Corvette. There's a saying among vintage racers: What's a 5 million dollar Ferrari good for? It's the best seat you can have for watching $30,000 Corvettes go by.

So, Fly's GTO slot car is fast. But, it's not all that much fun to drive. It's simply too stuck down for the amount of power it has. Thus, on the test track the fast way around involves holding the trigger all the way down except for three quick blips of the throttle per lap. That gets boring pretty quickly. In addition, the motor reaches dangerous temperatures in just a few minutes even though everything is properly lubed and turning freely.

Fortunately, it's easy to up the fun factor and increase motor life while getting the speeds down to a more reasonable level. As it happens, there is room just forward of the original magnet position to glue in a wider, longer Scalextric or Slot-it magnet, as shown in the photo below. This gives you less total downforce but spreads it over more of the car's width. You will still have magnetic grip, though not quite as much, but more important, you will have it over more of the car's width and, therefore, at greater cornering angles. The car will be somewhat slower but much more entertaining to drive. In short, you will be setting up your Fly car essentially as Scalextric cars come from the factory.

With this modification the car turned a best time of 4.972 seconds. That's a couple of tenths slower than I was aiming for, but the car is now much more drivable and fun. It should be no problem to gain those tenths with either a Slot It magnet, which is a little stronger than the Scalextric, or with silicone tires. By trying different combinations of three factors, magnet strength, magnet location, and tires, you can tune almost any group of slot cars to a common performance standard.

As always, I decline to state whether the car's dimensions are precisely to 1:32 scale. However, Fly has done a truly wonderful job of capturing the look and character of the 1:1 scale car and presenting it to a quality standard that should please almost everyone. Fly has even done a good job of making this slot car sturdy and crashworthy. After all the testing for this article, including the usual quota of crashes, not a single part is missing or even showing any damage. The car's driving characteristics will not be to everyone's liking, but it has the very useful virtue of being easily tuneable. After years of Fly products that have often fallen well short of justifying their prices, here's one that, even with its shortcomings, offers excellent value for the money.

Review car: Fly A1801 Ferrari 250 GTO, Lemans 1962, Dernier / Blaton.

US MSRP: $62.95

By now most of our readers know that Scott Bader, the owner of Electric Dreams, is a serious vintage racing enthusiast in both 1:32 / 1:24 scale and 1:1 scale. We got a chance to see him in action the weekend of June 23-25 at the HSR West event at California Speedway.

If you've never been to a superspeedway nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of one. The sprawling complex is simply massive. And not just the track itself; the facilities, from the parking lots to the grandstands to the hospitality suites to the garages, are all constructed on a grand scale. On this particular weekend there was almost nobody there but the participants so it was easy to wander around and get a feel for the sheer size of the place. We could walk through the entire paddock and climb to the roof of the hospitality suites behind the pits where we had a panoramic view of the track without 150,000 other people getting in the way. All in all it was a much more civilized environment than a NASCAR weekend, despite the 100+ degree heat that had us guzzling bottled water almost constantly. The right crowd and no crowding, to borrow a phrase from another time and place.




Scott brought out three of his cars, all immaculately prepared by his crew headed by the legendary Clayton Cunningham. When we arrived at the track all three cars were sitting under a vast awning running the length of Scott's transporter, a tractor-trailer rig that once served a top-level pro racing team.




The first was a black March 77B Formula Atlantic still bearing the name of original owner Ted Field and the logos of his Interscope Racing team that campaigned cars in IMSA and Indy Car racing for, among others, Danny Ongais, a drag racer turned road racing star in the 70s and 80s.




The second was the trickest 1965 Corvette roadster you will ever see on a race track. Scott has had this car a long time and it's developed to a level that most vintage racing cars never reach. Everything on it, Scott says, is period-authentic from the car's era, but it was 8 seconds a lap faster than anything else in its race group. Part of that, Of course, was Scott's driving, but a careful examination of the car will lead you to conclude that it's a very special Corvette indeed.




The third car was a red Lola T294 2-liter sports-racing car that looks like it's approaching escape velocity even while it's sitting on jack stands. Alas, that's where it stayed for most of the weekend after engine problems ended its racing on the first day.




My job for the weekend was to add to everybody's fun by setting up and running a 4-lane Scalextric layout under one end of the awning. From Friday morning on, the track, which was equipped with separate power to each lane, Parma controllers and a DS timing and scoring system, drew people in for fun (and shade). On hand to help out was that famous fugitive from Froggistan, Philippe de Lespinay. Philippe was in his usual fine form, full of politically incorrect stories and opinions expressed with gusto, on an astounding variety of subjects. He also brought some of his TSR cars that turned truly impressive laps on the Scalextric layout.

I started to take a tour through the paddock with him. It lasted until we came to the one and only Cro-Sal McKee Special, now owned and driven by retired businessman Norm Cowdrey. I started taking photos of the car, and by the time I was done Philippe was deep in conversation with Cowdrey on the subject of the inherent safety or lack of such of currently available racing driving apparel, of which both his knowledge and his conversational stamina appeared boundless.




On the track, Scott had a grand time with his 1600 cc March racing with several other drivers who had upgraded their newer ground-effects cars with 2-liter engines and still couldn't drive away from him. They seemed very reluctant to believe Scott's engine wasn't also a 2-liter. Switching to the Corvette he simply drove away from a small field of big-bore cars that included several GT350s. I suggested to Scott that he ask to be moved up to the next-faster group. "Sometimes I do," he told me.




Meanwhile, back at the slot car track we had a steady stream of people racing with the Scalextric Porsche Boxsters and Audi TTs we brought out for them to use. These little cars are great fun to drive and easy for complete beginners to get comfortable with. They are also nearly indestructible, which was a good thing in view of the number of times they got driven "over the cliff" and landed on the asphalt.





Not surprisingly, the most prolific slot car driver of the weekend was Scott himself. He seemed to like to follow his big-car driving sessions with a stretch of sitting in a chair with a bottle of water in one hand and a controller in the other, taking on all comers.


The featured race group (1:1 scale) of the weekend was the Historic Stock Car Racing drivers with their locomotive-sized ex-NASCARs still in their original Winston / Nextel cup colors and set up for road racing. The historic stock cars always run on road courses to keep speeds down and safety levels up. Still, at Cal speedway the road course uses over half the oval, giving the weekend warriors a taste of what it must be like for the big-name drivers 38 weekends a year. The famous drivers represented by their former rides included Rusty Wallace, Jeff Gordon, Kasey Kahne, Derrike Cope, Bobby Allison, Benny Parsons, Jimmy Spencer, and Richard Petty.






The taxicabs are becoming an ever-larger part of the vintage car racing scene because there are lots of them available at low prices. Every top-line NASCAR team builds around 20 new cars and retires 20 old cars each year. These cars don't have a lot of lower-level series to filter down to, so they reach the vintage racer market fairly rapidly, sometimes only a couple of years after their retirement from Cup competition. For mere tens of thousands a vintage stock car driver can own a car once driven by somebody really famous. Any other kind of race car with that kind of pedigree will be priced at six or seven figures. Thus, NASCAR provides the vintage racing community with a steady stream of genuinely historic cars that are cheap enough and replaceable enough to take out and have fun with in a way you can never really do with a multimillion-dollar icon like a Ferrari GTO, even if you can afford it to begin with.




Now that we have our demo track and related equipment together we'll be doing more public promotions at places with bigger crowds. You may see us at a race track, car show or other public event near you. When you do, come on over, race a slot car, and say hello to the Electric Dreams Team.

Time to time, something very special shows up at
auction, and keeping his nose on the ground, my buddy Jack picked up this
gorgeous hand built, original-engineering car. It dates from 1969 and virtually
everything is hand made!








The body is a Lancer McLaren M8A, superbly painted and decorated.








Mirrors and roll bar have been expertly added.








The injectors are spun aluminum...









Detailed exhausts and taillights.








This is something else: a gorgeous hand-cut brass chassis with unique
engineering features, and it looks hardly ever used. Also check this motor out:
looks like a Mura "B" can, but not like any I have ever seen!









Beautiful finish inside and out...

How do you replace anything like this, it is pure automotive art!

Its story is also interesting, as the man who made it is not your ordinary
slap-and-solder person. Indeed he is a careful craftsman, and probably had a
tough time to sell something in which he placed so much effort.








Let's hear its story by the gentleman himself:



"You asked about my McLaren slot car and, possibly, a brief history of me might
help.




I was fortunate to have a father who was the most knowledgeable and best all
around craftsman I've ever known. He was very active in tether car racing in the
Detroit area back in the 1940's. He always designed and built his own cars (and
even engines), and had good success with them including holding the world record
on several occasions. I hung out in his workshop and learned a great deal about
building things. I also inherited the modeling gene. As a kid I designed and
built airplanes, boats and cars. My Dad built a beautiful O-gauge train for a
Christmas gift for me and later we built a layout in our basement together.



I received an HO scale slot car set for Christmas in 1962 and was immediately
hooked. A slot car raceway named Tiny Tim's, near my home outside Detroit, had
an HO track and I started competing there weekly. My business was electric motor
sales and service, which involved rewinding motors so, naturally, I had to try
rewinding my HO scale slot car motors. The increase in performance was amazing!
Talk about an unfair advantage! The one fact I remember is that the Aurora
motors had 475 turns of very fine wire on each pole.



I then switched to 1/32 scale and raced AMT and Atlas cars that I rewound, and
then started designing and building my own cars to try to be more competitive. I
also rewound, balanced and otherwise modified my motors for better performance.
The first car of my own design was a two motor 4-wheel drive chassis that I
built to fit a Monogram Ferrari body that I had painted and decorated. My racing
buddies told me that two motors wouldn't work because the motors would fight
each other, but I rewound them exactly the same, and the car turned out to be
very competitive. My next design was a 4 wheel drive white Cobra roadster that
had a motor for which I made a longer shaft so that the motor could drive both
axles. I rewound and balanced the motor and installed stronger magnets. I also
balanced the gears. This car was VERY competitive. The acceleration and braking
were outstanding and I found that I could even race with most 1/24 scale cars.
It was obvious to me that the serious racers were running 1/24 scale so I
switched to that. By this time, I had begun picking up some ribbons and an
occasional trophy.



I had also built a three-lane track in my basement to run cars for testing and
to practice my driving, which was my weak point. This track had routed slots and
banked turns like the pro tracks and had a 75-foot lap length. With friends, who
were also full-scale midget race fans, I built and raced some rewound 1/24 scale
Monogram Midgets on that track and had a ball.



The next car that I built to race was a 4 wheel-drive 1/24 scale Ferrari with an
aluminum plate chassis and some modified commercial chassis parts that had
suspension.



I machined a special coupler so that I could drive a ball bearing mounted
extension shaft to the front axle. I rewound and balanced the motor and added
high strength magnets. I also balanced the gears. I had some success with this
car but thought I could do better, so I built another 4 wheel-drive car, this
time building a piano-wire and brass-plate chassis for a Ford Honker body. This
car had a similar motor and I used precision ball bearings on the axles and
front drive shaft and also balanced the gears and rear wheels. This car was
better and I won a few ribbons and a couple of second or third place trophies,
but decided to abandon 4-wheel drive.




I had begun racing at a track called the Groove Raceway also, where the areas
best drivers raced. I ran there for a while with mixed results until I built the
next car.



My next project was to try to design a 2-wheel drive car that would be capable
of winning consistently. This car was a blue and black McLaren. All of the cars
at that time were built with 1/16th brass rod. I got the idea that a 1/32" brass
plate chassis would lower the CG just that little bit, so that's where I
started.








I also decided to use the new angle-winder motor mount design to put more weight
on the drive wheels.









I built the slot car so that there was a little bit of movement in all three axis for
the body and the outer chassis plates. This seemed to help the handling. I had
also been thinking a lot about electric motor design. The magnets in the motors
were a significant amount longer that the armature iron, which was wasted energy
and extra weight above the CG, so I asked a friend of mine who had a diamond saw
to trim the new high strength magnets to just a hair longer than the iron.








Then I rewound the armature with aluminum wire of an appropriate gage and number
of turns for high torque rather than highest rpm. I also used an aftermarket
high temp end frame with high silver content brushes with heavy gage shunts. I
shimmed the magnets to minimize the air gap.



The lighter armature resulted in two things: a lower CG, and quicker
acceleration and braking. I also pressed the commutator a little bit closer to
the iron and with shorter magnets, could trim a bit off of the motor case making
the motor lighter yet. As usual, I mounted the rear axle in precision ball
bearings and balanced the gear and wheels.












Another thing I did was to run triple wires from the wiper pickups to the brush
holders to minimize voltage loss.







The result of all of this was a car that won the feature races most of the time
and won most of the six week series that the Groove Raceway had while I raced
this particular car. The car gave up just a bit on the long straight but was
better everywhere else.







The Groove also ran an open wheel class, so the next car I designed and built
was a Lotus Turbine Indy car painted yellow and black. I used basically the same
design and motor as the McLaren and had the same degree of success with it. This
car was the only car that I built for open wheel.



The next and last car that I designed and built was a red Lola. In this car, I
attempted to build as light as possible to try to gain an advantage. I had the
minimum amount of structure and had two brass strips that could slide sideways
for weight transfer.



The motor was different in that I removed some of the iron laminations to make
the armature shorter. I again used aluminum wire and trimmed the magnets and
case. This resulted in a very light motor that still had good power. I also
mounted the motor with the brush end forward, which put more weight on the rear.
This car handled about the same as the angle-winder. I had success with this
car, but it wasn't as good overall as the McLaren.




Another important p