Slot car options: the “platform question”

There are a few different brands and types of slot cars in this HO/1:64 size range and I suppose everyone has their reasons for liking one more than the other. During this earlier period, I tried out a few of them…

As a kid, all my slot stuff was Tyco: my first racing set that I got at age 5 was a Tyco Pro set with a pair of lighted Porsche racers. I did have one AFX “Magna Traction” back in those days which was actually one of my favorite cars, a blue and white Datsun 510 sedan that I raced until it melted down. But here in the 21^st century, I realized with a quick scan of ebay that the same small selection of bodies available for Tyco chassis when I was a kid was still about all that was availble! They’ve added a small number a new styles, and now that Mattel has bought the brand (along with every other toy company, it seems) they’ve spruced up the old castings to add some new life to them, but it’s pretty much the same Porsches, Corvettes, and hot rods that I remember seeing 40 years ago. There are a lot of people who feel the Tyco “inline” motor design was superior to the Aurora/AFX “Pancake” design, and that’s probably true, but whether its toys or the real thing, I’m more about how a car looks and feels than its performance numbers, so there were other things to consider.

The Magna-Traction format then seemed like the go-to choice; they are much closer to the 1/64 scale of my Matchbox and Hot Wheels collection than the smaller Thunderjets, and with Auto World having made a whole new line of them, the chassis are easy to get and reasonably priced.

But here again, I began to realize that I was unhappy with most of the Magna-Traction/X-Traction bodies; there’s a better variety than with Tyco-or at least the variety is more interesting to me-but most of the cars don’t look right, with their fixed wheelbases giving them somewhat cartoonish proportions. I know that the fixed wheelbase is innate to all slot cars and none is ever going to look perfect as a representation of the real car it is modeled on, but with only a few exceptions, the X-Traction line underwhelmed me.

That first trip to the local hobby stores in January of 2020 resulted in my buying two very different cars: an Auto World Thunderjet “Ultra-G” (a red ’69 Chevy Nova) and a Tomy AFX “Mega G+” (a blue Cobra Daytona coupe). There was no question which I liked better: one was blinding fast-so fast that it would take real skill and practice just to keep it on the track-while the other, much slower, had a more primitive, vintage feel to it that appealed to my love of old cars. When you consider that I’m still cruising around in my 1:1 scale toy car, a 1956 Chevy Two-Ten which still has its original DC charging system and drum brakes, this is hardly surprising.

But the choice to go with T-jets was influenced by a lot more than just that “vintage feel.” Just looking at the huge variety of body styles available for these old-school screw post-style cars was amazing enough, but another thing that drew me to T-Jets was the sheer number of people into them and the copious volume of information about them that was available online, including one of the main influencers of this decision: the discovery of Road Race Replicas, and the all the awesome accessories they make for this platform, including the construction of entire cars featuring bodies with absolutely beautiful detail.

All things considered, when I looked at all the accessories and customization methods, and figuring in the cost of the chassis and the overall “bang for the buck,” my path was chosen without even thinking about it.