Looking back over this here blog o’mine, I find only one passing mention of an experiment that I did back in the spring of 2021. It was around that time that I bought a single copy of a new chassis design from our friends at JAG Hobbies: an in-line chassis designed to be compatible with the original Thunderjet bodies, with the performance that met or exceeded the highest quality modern inline chassis designs you can buy.
JAG Hobbies is an awesome company; not only do they sell both antique original and some reproduction parts for Aurora T-Jets, but they make their own designs as well; the TR3 chassis is only one of 2 different chassis they’ve made, and I tried one out just see what it was like. INCREDIBLE, in a word; so fast you can barely even see them when they’re on the track.
And too fast-far too fast-to be included in my racing fleets against even the already fast Auto World Ultra G Thunderjet reproductions. It was a fun experiment, but that’s where it ended, since there was no way I was going to replace all 200 of my chassis with this new design. And thus my experimental journey with the TR3 chassis ended nearly as soon as it started: with only 2 of them acquired, which became artifacts on my shelf.
Wait…two? I only mentioned one, right? Well, there is a post-script to this, setting you up for the next post that will follow this one, as only this weekend, nearly 3 years after acquiring it, did I decide what to do with the second one I obtained. But that’s for the next post: for now, what I can tell you is that if you are one of those people who wants to race a modern slot car at modern speeds and you want to cloak it with an original T-Jet body, there are options for doing so, and the TR3 deserves your attention if that’s what you’re looking for.
Your humble blogger, however, is just old-skool enough that, as I said in one of the firsts posts I ever did, the affordable, obtainable Auto World Ultra G is my way of playing. I may have gone all-in on the Aurora originals since then, but the Ultra G’s still compose over 2/3 of my collection, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
I had never know these were such amazing and intricate machines. Seeing this zoom around the track under your skillful hand is way cool!!!