Started performing more work on this one as it was found to be tippy.  Weight has been pulled from the roof. A duck tail spoiler added and more weight will go down low along with a motor change from the yellow slot it motor to a raptor motor.  Then to find a track to tune on as I’ve always wanted to run a MRRC 911S in a proxy. We will see.

Firstly Andy apologises for missing a few rounds, no need Andy you have had a move and been busy with RL   

Here is the report from last Fridays meeting; it was Scalextric/SCX GT.  These are the fastest box standard cars that we race due to their low wide profile, they are fairly stable so produce come good close racing and provide a lot of fun for spectators.  There was a really good turnout for the evening with at least 15 racers from the very youngest members of the club to the more ‘experienced’  racers.  Unfortunately due to a technical issue with the red lane, which we are hoping to have fixed by the next meeting, we could only race 3 cars at a time but that didn’t spoil the fun that was had and still proved to be exciting.
 
Due to only racing 3 cars at a time and the large number of people that turned up there was a lot of heat races to get through so racing went on quite late for the night.  It was good to see all the youngsters getting involved and having some interesting races between them during the night, some of the heats seemed a little unfair how they played out, although they are totally random, with James being in a heat with Evie and Elijah but this didn’t seem to affect the youngsters who had a good battle between themselves.  Overall the heats, although there were a lot of them went very smoothly and without any major incidents occurring.
Once James had done all the working out for the finals this is how they looked.

E final: Paul in the green lane and Tom in the blue.  This was a close final with neither driver managing to pull out a big lead, both Paul and Tom were swapping places over the duration.  Although towards the end of the race Paul had built up a small lead due to Tom having a couple of crashes on the last few laps.  Paul ended up coming home with about ¼ of a lap lead over tom.

D final: Andy in Green, Paul in blue and Elliot in Yellow.  Off the line Andy and Elliot managed to get a good start a pulled out a small lead over Paul but then Andy went into the hairpin a little too fast and come off the track allowing Paul to come past and Elliot to take a good lead.  There was a good battle between Andy and Paul with Andy being faster in the corners and catching up but as soon as the cars got onto the straights the speed on Pauls Vauxhall Astra managed to pull away from the Andy’s Nissan Skyline.  Mean while Elliot at the front was maintaining the lead and came home in first place Paul came in second and Andy finished in third.

C Final: Darren in the Green lane, Elliot in blue lane and Heather in yellow.  This was looking to be a good race as all three had gone well in their various heats.  It was a good start by all three and they stayed as a pack for a good couple of laps.  Heather then had an off just before the chicane and this allowed Darren and Elliot to pull ahead.  Elliot then proved to be slightly quicker than Darren and managed to pull out a small lead.  Heather then had a couple of very quick laps and managed to catch up to Darren and Pass him.  This was how the positions stayed until the end of the race.

B Final: Ken in Green, Dave in Blue and Elliot in Yellow.  Ken got off to a good start, pulling out a good lead over Dave and Elliot,  and put in some quick time to build a good lead. Elliot and Dave got into a good battle for second place but when Dave had an off just after the start finish line this aloud Elliot to take advantage and take second place.  This left Dave in third with a lot of work to do to catch up which proved to be too much even for someone with Dave’s skill and experience.  Elliot good run in the finals had come to an end when he finished second and Ken came home in first place.

Main Final:  James in Green, Ken in Blue and Mark in Yellow.   Three of the fastest drivers of the night came together in the main final.  This was a fast and furious affair with lots of good, clean, close racing.  As you would expect it was tight from the off with little to choose between the racers, neither of them wanted to give an inch for the first few laps. James’s skill started to show through as he edged into the lead and started to pull out a gap over Ken and Mark. This left Ken fighting it out with Mark, after a few more laps mark had pulled ahead of Ken into second place. It finished James in first Mark in second and Ken in third.

   

Coming soon from Pete Shepherd's Racing Replicas is a wonderful Elva Courier - available as a ready-to-run slot car or as a resin kit. It features an accurate 1:32 scale body measured from one of the Elvas that Pete races against in the Equipe GTS classic racing series for production sports cars. There's a separate resin interior, optional roll bar, tonneau cover and mirror to allow the Courier to represent period 50's, 60's or modern-day classic racing cars...

       

The first two samples are shown here. The blue car is finished as a late 1950s club racer and the yellow one is more mid-60s and a slightly more serious competitor. Pete's skill in building and finishing a slot car model is always a privilege to see...

       

The Elva Courier is a great car to model. With a fibreglass body covering a tubular chassis, plus a 1489cc straight-four B-Series MGA engine coupled to a four-speed BMC gearbox, Elva's first production road car proved a big hit - sales being driven by success in North America from its launch in 1958. The engine position gave a near 50:50 weight distribution for excellent handling - and with the featherweight 700kg driven by upwards of 70bhp, the Courier had a 0-60 time of 11.2 seconds and a top speed of 100mph.

       

The first batch of Couriers were built at Frank Nichols' workshop in Bexhill, where he'd been building his Elva sports prototypes. Demand for the road cars meant a move to a proper factory in nearby Hastings, employing sixty staff who turned out three cars per week. Production of the Courier continued at full capacity into the 1960s - but Nichols went bankrupt when his American partner failed to pay up, a large shipment of cars lying on the quayside in New York with no way to recover them. The company was bought by Trojan-Lambretta and production of the Courier shifted to Croydon in 1962. Sports prototypes continued to be built by Nichols on the South Coast at Rye, most famously the customer versions of the early McLaren sports cars.

Here's what a racing Elva Courier looks and sounds like today...



The Racing Replicas body is designed to use a Penelope Pitlane Formula E chassis and scale 14" wheels, as were fitted on the real car...

       

The previous two Racing Replicas 'production' models - an Austin Healy 100 and MG MGA - have been sold through Pendle Slot Racing as hand-finished ready-to-run models (£179.99), a resin body kit with detailing parts and decals (£35) and a kit + running gear package using the PCS32 chassis for the Healy 100 and the Penelope Pitlane SMJ for the MGA (£72.50 and £75 respectively). The Elva should be in the same ballpark.

The new kit is expected soon - contact Pete directly via the Racing Replicas website or keep an eye on the Racing Replicas store at Pendles: https://www.pendleslotracing.co.uk/brand...licas.html

   

They have an extensive range of high quality 3DP figures, not cheap but well worth a look.

I wanted to start a thread here on how to tune your chassis, where to find information, what to look out for,.......

A very good source is another Forum, just dealing with HO Dragster :
https://nitroslots.com/forum

Another massiv source is of course YouTube.
A very good Video for 4gear tuning to start with is this: https://youtu.be/i9-L5lbNjHU

My personal standards that helped: 

• a stiff chassis is faster on the strip. For a road course I would choose a more flexible chassis.
  
• If lifting the rear of the chassis and applying power the whole chassis should not wobble/shake. This means no wobble on the axel, the rims should be round as should be the tires. It should run very quiet. More wobble - more time on the clock!
  

Hope this helps ! Please ask questions, more than willing to help and to answer!

Please share your insights, experiences, test results......!!!!!!!

The closer the racing, the more fun for all of us!!!!

Nico

   

All eyes are now on our first Digital Saturday for two and a half years. This is a full day of racing, with the schedule looking like this:

• 10am Track live: Practice & Digital Driving School
  
• 10.30am Club Car Rotation: 3 minutes with each of the six club cars.
  
• 12noon BTCC Qualifying & race with step-ups (16 laps each)
  
• 1.15pm Break: track power off
  
• 1.45pm GT Championship Team Race: Super-pole & 45 minute race
  
• 3pm Slot.it Group C: Qualifying, semi & 40 lap feature race
  
• 3.45pm Muscle Car Mondiale: Three 10 minute heats + feature race
  
• 5pm Finish
  

Details of regulations and race formats can be found in the pdf guide here: https://www.whoracing.org.uk/who_digital.html

Race fees: £6 for adults, £4 for under-16s. Or £3 / £2 for a morning or afternoon. We now have pre-pay options, including a WHO/digital season ticket. Ask Terry for details.

As always, we ask that all racers aged 12 or younger bring a responsible adult with them.

Digital Saturday format: Our Digital Saturdays carry on the same fun and close competition as the Wednesday night events. The Club Car Rotation and GT Team Race are open to all - the other three classes do require your own car to take part, although sometimes there will be ‘loaners’ available.

Cars for Sale: There will be a few suitable cars for BTCC and Muscle Car Mondiale available to buy at the Digital Saturdays at knock-down prices. If you have WHO/digital cars that are surplus to requirements, please do bring them along to offer to your clubmates. There’s usually time to help prepare cars ready for racing - with Mike’s urethane racing tyres at £3 a pair and C8515 digital chips at £15. If you've bought a new car, let us know asap on Saturday morning so we can help you get it ready.

Covid precautions: Covid cases have levelled-off across England at a higher level than we’d like. Because some of us will be at the Barn from 8am to nearly 6pm, some caution is still necessary to keep everyone safe. Most importantly, please do not attend if you have any symptoms that might be Covid. Inside the Barn, wearing a face mask, practising good hand-hygiene and giving each other space remain non-negotiable requirements. We will ensure as good ventilation as possible - and fingers-crossed there’s good weather to enjoy in the outside areas. Any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Food & Drink: There will be no food or drink provided by the club this time. However, the kitchen will be open - with the use of the fridge, microwave, boiling water dispenser and the very best West Sussex tap water. There’s also a Tesco Express, Spar and chip shop no more than 5 minutes walk away.

Please do let us know if you’re coming - this makes the job of our race control volunteers easier. And if you have any questions - just ask!

A game of two halves.
Scalextric C3782 - BMW M3 E30 BTCC 1991 Donington Steve Soper.
Scalextric C3739 - BMW M3 E30 BTCC 1988 Brands Hatch Roland Ratzenberger.

These M3s have been out for a few years now but various liveries  are still available so a review may be of interest.

I was a fan of the super tourer era of the BTCC, went to many of the rounds and the rivalry between Cleland and Soper was legendary but I wouldn't normally have bought these two cars. Thirty plus years ago saloons were a lot narrower than the current crop so any slot version close to scale dimensions is likely to be a real tippy handful round the twisty bits. Couldn't resist at the silly prices in TopSlots n Trains recent sell off though and got two for the price of one. I like having matched pairs of cars for my home races so thought I would give them a try. Was this a good idea? Read on.

Top half
Lovely, lovely bodies! They look right and the tampo printing is just about spot on as you can see with the side by side comparison with the real thing. The BMW Finance and BTCC fonts on the Soper car could both have done with a touch of bold but nothing major to quibble about.
       

The real Ratzenberger car does look a slightly different shape but I think that is a wide angle lens shot which tends to distort things a bit.
       

Top marks also for the rear wings, they are made of more bendy plastic than the rest of the body so should be less prone to breakage.

Unfortunately Scalextric blotted their copy book by fitting incorrect drivers' heads. They have lifted one from their rally cars so we have a microphone attached which was never there in real life. Why they keep doing this is beyond me, they have plenty of correct ones they could have used.

A dropped point for that gives us 9 out of 10 for the bodies then.

Bottom half
The chassis is the standard Scalextric inline one so I lubricated the relevant parts, changed the tyres for urethanes and set both of them off round the track for an hour at 4 volts for some running in. Incidentally everything worked first time with no quality control issues so full marks on that score. I liked the correct wheels on each version as well.

However, it was at this point that I began to suspect something was amiss as the Ratzenberger car was lapping over a second slower than the Soper one at exactly the same voltage. The gears seemed just a bit notchy so I gave it the toothpaste treatment which smoothed them out but didn't radically improve the speed.

I know that motors can vary a bit but this discrepancy was way wider than normal so it was time to put the bodies back on and give the cars a proper run. Ratzenberger first and it confirmed my suspicions, the proverbial rice pudding skin was in no danger with this motor and lap times around 6.5 seconds was near the bottom end of performance on my track. On the plus side though it handled reasonably well within the limitations of its narrow track and was nowhere near as tippy as I expected. Slowish cars don't bother me so long as I have another of similar speed for racing purposes.

Soper car up next to see if I had anything like a matched pair and this is where things started to fall apart. The motor was obviously a lot more powerful but, lo and behold, welcome to our old friend the Ninco hop! The thing bounced down the track under full power like a demented pogo stick and resisted all attempts to set a representative time.

A full strip down soon revealed the culprit - the rear of the chassis round the axles was about as rigid as a paper napkin so any normal motor would twist it under acceleration and a good deal of gluing and bracing would need adding to firm it up. The weak motor in the other car meant that it never accelerated hard enough to cause problems.

So, after a very promising first half, team Scalextric fell apart in the second and receives the dreaded nil points for the chassis although it would probably be perfectly OK for magnet racing. All of which leaves me with a dilemma - is it worth replacing both chassis with a 3DP version or should I just find a slower motor in the spares box for the Soper one?

Just got round to opening my Top Slots & Trains NSR Fiat Abarth and was surprised to see how low the driver sat. Turns out the interior wasn't fitted in place at the front so it had dropped down, just hanging from the rear fittings.

Likewise, the windscreen isn't secured and flaps about.

Both can be fixed but is this normal for new NSR's?

(I've always bought used before so expect to do some remedial work - in fact that's part of the fun - but I wouldn't expect this on a new car.)

It can't be returned as they are now out of stock, so it couldn't be replaced.

         

Master model-maker George Turner started working on his Mini Marcos back in February. The project has lain idle for a while, but the good news is that it's been back on George's bench. The model is going to be of the 1966 Le Mans car - a private entry by French rally driver and Mini dealer Jean-Louis Marnat, co-driven by Le Mans legend Claude Ballot-Léna in only his second start at La Sarthe. The Mini Marcos was the only British car to finish the race in 1966, albeit nearly a hundred laps behind the winning GT40. Forget Ford vs Ferrari, Jem Marsh and Frank Costin's little Mini-derived Marcos coupé is the star of this film...



Marnat prepared a Mk1 Mini Marcos for the race, replacing the standard 1275cc Mini Cooper S engine with a Group 2 spec unit prepared by the BMC competition department for the Monte Carlo Rally - tuned to produce 91 bhp and the capacity increased to 1287cc. Top gear gave the Marcos a top speed of just over 120 mph on the Mulsanne straight. To deal with the demands of 24 hours racing in June, an extra radiator was fitted across the front the car, hence the characteristic vent on the bonnet. The Marcos ran on 10" Minilites. A factory Mini Marcos was entered into the race for 1967 with a different front end shape - a car that George may also produce - but it retired after only 13 laps. That makes this 1966 version the most famous racing Mini Marcos - and there are plenty of replicas and original Mk1s out there paying homage to Marnat's blue and yellow car...



Any racing Marcos is fabulous to watch - I thoroughly enjoyed seeing that Marnat-tribute at Goodwood and there are others on the club scene, adding glamour and panache to the Classic Sports Car Club 'Swinging Sixties' series.

Watching a model take shape is also something rather special and George obliges on his Facebook page, website and various Facebook groups...

       

The Mini Marcos is particularly good to watch - as it's such a brilliant subject for a slot car...

       

The work on the shell is meticulous, but it has now reached the stage where running gear can be added...

       

...and we can start to imagine what a finished and decorated version of the 1966 Le Mans car will look like...

       

Keep an eye on George's website and Facebook page for more news. When the Marcos is ready to buy, I'll post details here.

Just noticed it had just started on BBC2