Harkening back to my post from last year about “cars we need to see as Thunderjets,” I am delighted to say that there are actually a couple of those cars on my wish list that have been made in slot format, although they are extremely hard to come by and astronomically expensive. Over the last month I have had the displeasure of losing 2 auctions for a pair of Bauer slot cars, both sitting on T-Jet chassis, that I desperately wanted. One of these was an MGB GT – I didn’t even know it existed until I saw it appear on ePay a while ago, and though I threw my hat in the ring, I couldn’t keep up with what it eventually went for: nearly $250. Ditto for another Bauer job, a 300SL GULLWING coupe in tan; this is one I had heard about via chatter but had never actually seen until this one came up for sale.
As any slot-head knows, Bauer slot cars are top of the mark and always very expensive; I wanted both of these, and maybe if I had seen them in a different month it would have worked out, but not at this time, not with “Bidenflation” still crushing my existence. Now that I know its out there, you can bet I’ll be hunting for it again when funds are more plentiful. Losing these, however, got me all hot and bothered about 300SL’s, and it so happened that on the same week I lost these cars, I scored a very good price on an Aurora vibrator classic: a virginal copy of their own 300SL roadster in “Old English White.” It was a completely unmolested original, mounted on an original Vibrator chassis which, of course, did not run, as vibrators usually don’t. Seeing this got me thinking, though, and I realized I could replace my slightly mangled white 300SL in the Road Crew with this copy and repurpose the one in the Road Crew for the big track! So I hit “buy it now” and the fun began!
Converting any Vibrator to a Thunderjet requires some “modification,” but this has to be done both discretely and carefully: the idea is to carve enough plastic out of the underside of the car-and particularly the rear face of the front grille and bumper-to get the T-Jet chassis to fit without showing any sign that any modification has taken place when seen topside. I’ve described this procedure many times in the past, and I will reiterate: patience is a virtue, this process cannot be rushed! Do so and you may do what I did to my first white 300SL, and heat the plastic up enough with your grinder to melt a small hole through the edge of the hood! Yes, I’m embarrased to admit I did that, and while it was hardly noticeable, I knew it was there, which is why I was willing to carve it up even more to try to get the even bigger Ultra G chassis to fit. I might never have tried this had I not previously bought one from a seller on ePay who had already converted one, which worked great! If someone else can do it, so can I!
The first order of the day was to modify the recent replacement car as carefully as possible to get an original Aurora T-Jet 500 chassis to fit. Once this was accomplished, and the car was successfully tested, I turned my skills to make a racer out of the previous version. It took a lot of test fitting, a lot of careful observation, and a lot of very careful work with the Dremel, but over time, I was able to duplicate most of what had been done on the red car I bought 2 years ago, and then I had a pair of 300SL’s on Ultra G chassis, ready to race! All that was left to do then was add the racing numbers!
I suspect most car enthusiasts know the story of the 300SL roadster; that after the gullwing coupe cleaned up on racing tracks all over the world between 1952 and ’55, MBZ was stuck with bins of leftover parts after the company made the painful decision to withdraw from racing after the 1955 LeMans disaster. Nearly every gullwing coupe built through the rest of that year and the year following was sold as a road car, but although they did find buyers (many which went to private drivers and wound up on racing tracks anyway), the coupe’s difficult to enter/exit design made it a hard sell for a road car. As a result, for 1957 the company redesigned the car’s frame, compromising one of the features that made it such a successful racing car, in order to fit it with “proper doors.” This redesign was a great success from a marketing perspective; despite its stratospheric price, this new, more “user friendly” version sold so well it was kept in production all the way through 1962. As an interesting byproduct of the redesign, the rear suspension was also reconfigured, which allegedly gave the roadster better handling than the coupe.
Even with conventional doors and the added weight resulting from the redesign, the 300SL was still a car that was years ahead of the competition in terms of performance. The world can only wonder what might have happened in the final years of the 1950’s if MBZ has stayed in the game, but as the racing world became a battle between Ferrari and Jaguar, very few 300SL roadsters were seen on the track. However, that won’t prevent a couple of pioneers from showing up at the Sports Car Races at Drag City with something to prove!
You may recall the red version you see here being profiled in another post long ago where I made a remark that, at the time I bought it, it was about the highest price I’d ever paid for a slot car, and I was so worried about damaging it that I didn’t want to race it. Well, in the time since I’ve became a more skilled driver and I’ve paid far more for other cars, so now I’m saying, what the hell, let’s race! And so I shall! Here they are, ready for the qualifying round, and at the time this post went to press I hadn’t even come up with names for these cars, but since I just came up with them, here they are…
| CAR | # | CAR NAME | DRIVER NAME |
| red 300SL | 40 | SCENE STEALER | Hudson “HOLLYWOOD” HOAG |
| white 300SL | 92 | SIX SHOOTER | Jude “SAILOR” SANDUSKY |
Looks like the garages at Drag City have been busy modifing and turning out these beauties. I enjoy the history of the real cars that inspire these models. These look like they will make for some great racing!