In the earliest days of my slot car hobby, one of the things that most drew me to the Thunderjet platform was the ability to customize the cars with aftermarket wheels and tires, something that couldn’t be easily done with 1:64 die-cast cars without breaking them apart. At the same time, what turned me off of the original T-Jet chassis was their dull chrome disc wheels with their paper-thin tires; what fun could that be, I thought, trying to race a slot car with tires like that?
Though I’ve now “seen the light”, as it were, and have become interested in these slower original cars and the more realistic performance characteristics of racing without a traction magnet, I wasn’t wrong about my initial impression: the original T-Jet tires don’t have any traction, and they are very hard to keep on the track at any speed! And yet, Aurora’s original solution to this, the “Tuff Ones” mag wheels and their related
tires-which seem to have been made of something resembling sponge rubber-were even worse, making the cars look like some goofy Fisher-Price toys, ruining the realism that made them appealing in the first place. Fortunately these were redesigned to a much better looking smaller diameter mag wheel which brought realism back to the format, and this successful design is the one Auto World is now using for their Ultra-G platform, but since “The Road Crew” is strictly a vintage project, I intend to run all these cars on the original format.
Having now rebuilt all of my original chassis and gotten them running, I have also fitted them with all the original tires I could find. I had a good stash of them, many of which were taken from the original Cigar Box models I converted to slot bodies for my racing fleets, but enough of them are dried out with age that they have lost even the meagre traction abilities they might once have had, and leave the cars just spinning in place when I hit the “gas.” I knew right from the start I was going to have some issues here.
Fortunately, today’s technology has given us some new options. Here are a few I have tried…
Many of the higher performance cars are now wearing some variation of one of these:
Jel Claws are made of synthetic rubber rather than the silicone that composes the tires I’ve been using for my Ultra-G racing cars. I’ve chosen to use style 2031, which are slightly thicker than the original tires, although the 2030 style is also available, which is the same size as the originals. These have made a significant difference in the traction abilities of these cars! I have seen some threads on various forums of people badmouthing these tires, but they seem OK to me, especially for the price; I don’t know if they are the best on the market, but the price can’t be beat, and what I really like is that-on one side, anyway-the sidewalls have the ribbed pattern of the original tires, which is a nice touch…kind of like those Coker radials made for 40’s and 50’s cars that look like the original bias ply tires!
Of course, since I’m always more about style than performance, I also ordered a set of whitewalls and a set of redlines from Joe Skylark; unfortunately, these don’t have the grip of the Jel Claws; in fact, they don’t seem to be any better than the original tires, but it would hard to pass them up on looks alone.
I have, however, recently found a vendor that sells another brand called “Super Tires” that I’ve heard a lot of good things about. These are made of urethane. I have a few sets on order as well, but I have one set of already that came on a mixture of different cars I’ve bought over the last couple of years. At the moment these are fitted to my yellow Dodge Charger. These tires are a slightly smaller diameter than the originals and are also a bit thicker. They are definitely “stickier” than the Jel Claws, but their smooth sidewall is unattractive to me, so I am likely to reserve the use of these for only those cars that I really want to have good grip…something that is unlikely to come up with these originals, since I am not competitively racing them.
Lastly, JAG Hobbies sells a type of silicone tire for the originals that I’m also trying for the 1st time. This latter set went onto my ’61 Impala, a car which, it turns out, is mounted on the fastest original Aurora chassis I have; so fast, in fact, that I was forced to slow it down (first by downgrading the magnets and then by actually changing out the motor), and it can still beat just about every other car in the Road Crew so far; the problem is keeping it on the track! These tires certainly have some bite, but it still “spills” in nearly every turn. Probably the best solution here is for me to become a better driver!
Obviously there’s only so much to be done when you can’t fit more than a 1/4” of rubber under the wheel wells, but I want these cars to keep their original look (for the most part) and until something even stickier comes out, I’ll swap things around until I get the best results I can and keep motoring on!
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