I was kindly sent some broken single seater Tyco and Tomy bodies by Dennis from Slot Lodge a few years back. 

This one had a single end plate and no front suspension. I cut off the end plate and used it as a template to make some new plasticard ones. I did make an angled rear wing but in the end settled for a single piece one instead. I put an additional brace under the body to give more surface area to weld the new end plates on. 

The other SG body had one piece of front suspension. This was cut off and used as a template for new plasticard pieces. For a future car it might be better to make a single unit with struts running through the body in newly cut channels. This would be stronger so I will look at doing that.

This car is now awaiting warmer weather to visit the paint booth. Decals are on the way from Patto and it will become one of my signature (livery of choice) AT&T cars to match my Nascar and Modified cars.

Scalextric have released two more liveries of their 1986 stock cars this week...

         

C4079 Chevrolet Monte Carlo  - Green & White #55    /    C4088 Ford Thunderbird - Yellow & Black #46

And here they are on track at the Scalextric launch last month...

         

These two new cars for 2020 brings the total of classic Nascar racers to seven individual  liveries, two set cars and two unpainted cars - eleven in total. For digital racers looking for a colour-coded grid, there are two red cars, two green cars, one blue car, two yellow cars, one white car and one black car.

The liveries are all 'fantasy' schemes put together by the Scalextric design team. Most are based on the colour schemes of cars that ran in 1986 Winston Cup, but with different numbers and sponsors. This means there is no need to pay Nascar any licensing fees - and they are rather fun too. The unpainted cars give the option of reproducing actual liveries. A couple of the cars pay homage to earlier liveries on different cars, which I like.

The latest two liveries are based - I guess - on these cars...

   

This is the Thunderbird the late, great Alan Kulwicki raced during the 1986 Winston Cup season - when he won the Rookie of the Year award. When team owner Bill Terry pulled out mid-season, Kulwicki formed his own team around the #35 Quincy's car. He would remain an owner-driver for the rest of his short career and won the championship in 1992. Scalextric's Allama livery is a very close copy of the Quincy's Steak House car.

   

The #88 Gatorade livery is a classic - although not raced in 1986 on a Chevy Monte Carlo, it did appear on earlier Monte Carlos, as well as Pontiacs and Buicks. The livery was driven by Darrell Waltrip in the Winston Cup between 1976 and 1980, Waltrip just missing out on the championship in 1979. Ricky Rudd's #88 Monte Carlo had the same Gatorade livery in 1981, with Bobby Allison taking over in 1982 and finishing second in the championship. There's a lot about the Scalextric Arrow Head livery that shouts out 'Gatorade' and it is definitely one of my favourites so far.

I fully intend to the review the Scalextric Chevy and Ford on track at some point. There has been talk that the two bodies are too different to race together. The Monte Carlo certainly looks bigger and bulkier - as it did in real life - but these are the 1/32 scale figures for the Scalextric models...

Ford Thunderbird: Length 155mm; Wheelbase 86mm; Guide pivot to rear axle 103mm; Rear track 54mm; Weight 82g
Monte Carlo: Length 164mm; Wheelbase 86mm; Guide pivot to rear axle 112mm; rear track 56mm; weight 89g

My first impressions are that the Monte Carlo is a tank - and brilliant fun to drive. The T-bird is a little more nimble around the twisty stuff. If absolute parity is required, the painted and unpainted cars do allow a fleet of either the Chevy or the Ford. I think they are fun to race together and a number of tests (mag and non-mag) against the clock and in racing conditions suggest it is swings and roundabouts between the two.

The Thunderbird and Monte Carlo are both high-detail cars, but with no working lights (Nascars don't have them). Both cars are Digital Plug Ready (DPR), although the Chevy may need this modification to count laps reliably with ARC Pro. The 1986 stock cars are released in the Super-Resistant cardboard boxes at the Super-Resistant RRP of £34.99. The cars are available for pre-order at Pendles and MRE and are due with retailers over the next few days. They are already available from the Scalextric website.

   

We are back at the Barn next week for our second Digital Wednesday of the year...

We will start the evening with a Club Car Team Race and end with a Trans-Am pairs race. Doors open at 6.30pm for practice, racing starts at 7 and we aim to finish all the action by 9.45. The team race will finish at 8.30, if you can only stay for part of the evening. Entry is £3 (£2 for under-16s). All equipment is provided for the team race and there should be plenty of spare places in the Trans-Am race.

This was a kit bash that I did a while back.
A 1/32nd scale  1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham by Gunze Sangyo




The sensible choice of chassis seemed to be a Revell Stocker chassis, as I intended to run it against
these and other similar kits to be made up. I had some nice whitewall tyres, and set up a Revell
Galaxy chassis with some nice 72 pitch gears, Slot.it bushes and axle, and some BWA 15 x 6mm
wheels I had lying about – Chassis runs sweet, even though it lacks much in the way of guide lead.



The first thing I discovered was that luxurious Caddys came with a wheelbase longer than some
football fields.  Time to get creative – or butcherous.


So I stripped the chassis bare, cut it, fitted a ¾”/ 20mm wide section of plasticard, braced it with
some brass rod, and stuck the whole thing together with JB Weld, while holding it square and flat
on a chassis flattening plate with lots of magnets.





Now I would like to inform you that this looks a bit rough because it has just dried and I haven’t
cleaned it up yet. I would LIKE to tell you that, but mother said I shouldn’t lie.



But when it was done, I had a chassis with the correct wheelbase, which runs very nice, smooth,
and predictable.
The body posts were made up to fit at back, and in the front, I used a small square of velco
under the bonnet and on the top of the plate which holds the front axle assembly. It took a bit
of messing about to get the height correct, but once done it was an easy solution for a car that
isn’t going to be an out and out racer.

Undercoat then some silver then finished with several light coats of gloss black, and I am ready
to cruise Sunset boulevard.









A bit of work to do on inserts and other detail, and I really should fit it with some interior lights
for cruising... one day. Meanwhile its elbows out the window, rolled up jeans and a white T-shirt

What is the most common irritation when working on your cars? For me it is undoing body screws and watching them roll off the workbench onto the floor never to be seen again until you ferret through the dust in the vacuum cleaner.

Here is my solution - magnetic insulation tape attached to your work surface:
       

You could use the magnets removed from your cars but tape covers a larger area so is more likely to catch the errant screws and other metal bits. I found mine in the craft section at Poundland but other stores like The Range and Hobbycraft also do it.

The HO-UK Club Challenge has been running since 2015. It is a fun way to link the various HO clubs in the UK without organising any extra events or requiring club members to travel around the country. There are several events each year that bring HO racers together - the highlight being the HO Le Mans in Derby in November - but the Club Challenge is a month-by-month competition based on each club's regular calendar..

The five clubs currently signed-up for 2020 are:

• Derby HO Racing Club (DHORC) Facebook page here
  
• Four Lane Black Top HO (FLBT-HO) Website here
  
• HO South East (HOSE) Facebook page here
  
• The HO Racing League (THORL) Website here
  
• Worthing HO Racing (WHO) website here
  

HO clubs in the UK have a wide variety of classes, rules and formats. One thing we that we do have in common is a heats and finals format. The HO-UK Club Challenge ranks racers on success in their finals, irrespective of which final they end up in after qualifying heats. Based on performance in their first final of the race, racers get four points for first, three points for second, two for third and one for fourth place.

Because each club has a different number of events counting towards the Club Challenge, Doug (TopDown) has fine-tuned an algorithm that keeps the table as competitive as possible. Over the five previous years, we've had five different winners from five different clubs. Here's the 2020 table after all the January races...

       

HOSE and THORL are still to start their seasons.

The full Club Challenge spreadsheet is available on the HO-UK website: www.ho-uk.org.uk/ho-uk-club-challenge

   

Sunday 16 February: NSCC Milton Keynes Swapmeet
10am-2.30pm at Woughton Leisure Centre, Leadenhall MK6 5EJ
More details: www.nscc.co.uk

Some time ago I bought this: https://slotracer.online/community/showt...p?tid=1010  on a bit of a whim. I loved the look of it - and the challenge Brian threw down to tame the beast.

On arrival the car looked great but on track the performance was disappointing. Very noisy and slow.

 
          

The next addition to BRM's fabulous 1/24 scale Group-2 Mini-Saloon cars is the Alfa Romeo 1300 Junior GTA.

           

These images of the first pre-production model were released by BRM a couple of weeks ago. The first three cars are due to arrive with retailers next month (March 2020) and will be priced at £105 each in the UK.

I have to say that I am personally very excited by this release. One of my earliest memories is of accompanying my father to buy his 1970 Alfa GT 1300 Junior at a car dealer. It was his last chance to have a sports car before me and my sister would need a sensible family car to sit in the back of. The red Alfa had 'one careful lady owner', but got a good thrashing from my dad for the next three years. I remember the leather bucket seats in the back, the sensational noise from the 1300cc twin-cam engine and roadholding that scared the living daylights out of me along some of our local country lanes. Not that I ever turned down the offer to go for a ride in the Alfa and I always came back with a smile on my face and adrenaline pumping through my veins.

The BRM model is the GTA version of the Junior - with the lightened Alleggerita aluminium body panels and race prepared by Autodelta. The 1300cc engine in the GTA Junior was derived from the 1600cc GTA unit, but with a shorter stroke. With fuel injection, it produced 178 bhp and a top speed of 130mph. Both the 1600 GTA and 1300 GTA Junior were very successful on the track, including in North America. That success was matched by the slightly later GTAm cars.

The 1300 GTA Junior scored nine overall race wins and 54 class wins between 1968 and 1984 - the 1971-2 European Touring Car Championship Division 1 rules certainly favouring the Junior. Thanks to the Division 1 class wins, Alfa Romeo won the ETCC manufacturers' title in 1971 and 1972 - GTA Juniors taking a clean sweep of class wins in 1972.

From the first three BRM cars, the livery that jumps out at me is the 1300 GTA Junior that won its class (Division 1) at the 1972 Jarama 4 hours - round nine of the 1972 European Touring Car Championship. Driven by the Dutch pairing of Toine Hezemans and Gijs van Lennep, the car finished fourth overall...

   
   
   
BRM-105 BRM Alfa Romeo 1300 Junior No.33 4h Jarama 1972 Winner Div.1 - 1/24th Scale

Without the flared arches, a 1/24 scale GTA Junior should be around 66mm wide, which places the BRM model into their Mini-Saloon range that can race on the wider 1/32 scale sectional track systems (Ninco and Policar), but will be rather tight on Scalextric. The recent Opel Kadett GT/E came in at 72mm wide, so perhaps the slightly over-exaggerated  wheel-arch styling on the Alfa has pushed the width out to something similar? Underneath, I expect the Alfa's chassis and running gear to be very similar to the Kadette:  slotracer.online/community/showthread.php?tid=940

The other two liveries due next month are also rather nice. The first is the Alfa that came third in class at the 1972 Jarama 4 hours - driven by Luigi Colzani, "Pooky" (Vincenzo Cazzago) and Vittorio Venturi, three regular GTA Junior drivers through 1972...

   
BRM-107 BRM Alfa Romeo 1300 Junior No.35 4h Jarama 1972 3rd Div.1 - 1/24th Scale

The final car was the Division 1 class winner at the 1971 Paul Ricard 12 hours - round seven of the 1971 European Touring Car Championship. The race took place over two days, with one 6 hour race per day. The #40 Alfa was driven by Gianluigi Picci and Guy Chasseuil. Picci was another regular GTA Junior driver in 1971 and 72...

   
BRM-106 BRM Alfa Romeo 1300 Junior No.40 12h Paul Ricard 1971 Winner Div.1 - 1/24th Scale

A big thank you to Neil at Pendle Slot Racing for the pictures and release information. All three cars are available as pre-orders from Pendles: www.pendleslotracing.co.uk/brand/brm/group-2-cars