Someone asked me a while ago which of my slot cars is my favorite. As any collector knows, this is rarely a simple question to answer. However, in my case, I actually can answer it. Of all the slot car bodies I’ve ever obtained, including the custom made ones, there is one molding that stands above the others as the one I like the best: the Model Motoring 1955 Chevy Bel-Air.
Naturally this starts with being one of my favorite cars ever made; as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog I own a 1:1 scale 1956 Chevy, and the one I still have is the 4th one I’ve owned throughout my life. Although the ’56 is my favorite of the “Tri-Fives”, the ’55 is close behind (I’ve never been quite as fond of the ‘57 model, although its still a great car). But more than that, the MM version of this car looks very good; a few other outfits, including Aurora again, later, for the AFX chassis, and more recently Dash Motorsports, have rendered the ’55 Chevy, but none of the other efforts I’ve seen are as good as this one. Seen from above, the proportions do seem a little off, with the body appearing too short for its width, but seen from any other view it looks dead-on, and all the details are right.
So as you can see I have acquired 3 of these beauties, but at this point I’m wondering what to do with them! Currently all 3 of them are in The Road Crew, with the red and 2-tone models mounted on very good running low mileage “open rivet” T-Jet chassis and the white one being one of only 2 mounted on one of the very high-peformance Dash chassis. Nothing wrong with any of these, but that same solid white car-the first one I got-was originally in the Muscle Car racing fleet. I never raced it much, though, because I was always afraid of crashing it hard enough to damage it if I got realy competitive with it. I still worry about that now, and anyway, the design of the rear wheel wells-true to the real car-doesn’t lend itself to the wide wheels and tires that the rest of the cars in my racing fleet have.
Every time I think I want to x-fer one of these cars back to the racing fleet I pause, for that reason: I don’t want to break parts off of these, not at today’s prices! They were expensive when I bought them, but now it would probably cost 3 figures to replace one, if I could even find it!
Another solution, though, may be to buy one that’s already been modified. Obviously the temptation to redo this body as a “gasser” is almost irresistible and any look on the usual site will show that plenty of people have! Although even these modifieds still get premium prices, I wouldn’t feel as bad about “losing one” if the worst case scenario were to occur: a really severe high speed crash during a race.
This is likely to be my next trick; this pic is from the web and it not my own, but I have obtained 2 sets of these narrow Cragar wheels from Vincent that I bought with the intent of adding to one of my 55’s; this is why I’m looking for an orange one!
So, what to do, dear readers? For now I will stand pat, but as you can see from these pages, things are always changing, so I suspect there’s a high performance “Double Nickel” in my future. If anyone reading this has an orange one you’d like to sell, contact me; I’m looking for one in that color!
I would feel the same with these beauties. I would crusie them around the track between races but would be hesitant about racing for fear of damage. The preportions do look great on these as compared to the actual car. I know from what I’ve read and seen here that some models are better than others. The 55, like the 56 is an absolutely beautiful and classy looking car!