Thursday Night SUPER STOCK Action at Drag City
Thursday night visits from my racing buddy Shanon are always fun! This was a short night-we only had a little over an hour to run the track-but run it we did, and it was a blast!
A Hot Wheels “Toxic Shock!”
Unfortunately for your humble blogger, however, that fun night of racing began with a very strange and unpleasant discovery! I don’t even recall what lead to this, but my friend and I were having a conversation about my Hot Wheels collection and I pulled a couple of cases off a shelf in the toy room and reached in to pull out a really cool 1999 First Edition that I’ve always been fond of, but that hasn’t seen the light of day in probably 10 years or more. I bought this car at a store back in SoCal when it first came out shortly before relocating to Colorado, and for some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of picking this one up.
This was the first release of the fantasy car called “Turbolence,” which looks to me like a late ‘40s/early 50s dry-lakes land speed car. It’s very long and quite heavy, being metal both top and bottom (you fellow collectors remember when most 1st Editions were like that?). Finished in black with gold trim and purple accents, it had a gold engine and interior and “5-Dot” wheels also plated with gold. It was an extremely good looking car, with a big number “1” painted on the front and the name “Dayla Special” in brush script right beside the engine, making it look just like something you would have seen at Bonneville around 1950!
The casting has been out of print since 2008, and during its 10-year production run there were several subsequent releases of this car-some better than others-but this first one was by far the best.
So imagine my horror when I took it out of its safe little crate in my 48-car case to find that it had contracted some sort of “toxic shock syndrome!” I have no idea how this happened, but some chemical reaction occurred to this car which corroded the gold plating on the wheels, turning it to an ugly dark brown. And that wasn’t all: the gold plating on the rest of the car, while still a uniform color, also appeared dull and faded, and even the metal baseplate looked darkened, as if it had been exposed to the air for years.
How could a car kept safe in a plastic and vinyl case and untouched for a decade or more wind up in this condition??? That’s the reason this was so distressing: the loss of this car is unfortunate but I’ll survive it, but it was in a case filled with some of my most valuable REDLINES! In a panic, I began to remove every car in the case looking for signs of similar deterioration but I saw none; everything else looked fine: it appears to be only this one car that was affected by…well, whatever happened!
I sure can’t explain this, but I can tell you I hi-tailed it over to the sites and grabbed another mint copy of the same car, and surprisingly I was able to get a loose one in mint condition for less than $10! That was both good and bad at the same time (is that really all a mint copy of an awesome 1st edition from last century is worth???) and since it just arrived, I’m writing it all up here.
Note the replacement shown here next to the damaged one, where you can see clearly that in addition to the ruined wheels, the gold plating on the rest of the car appears more pale, as if it were somehow bleached. As I said above, what bothers me about that is not knowing what happened here and whether I need to worry about it happening again!
For now, I’ve satisfied myself that there is no other damage, so I’m putting this down to a fluke…but man, its a weird one! All I can think is that the chemical composition of the gold plating on the wheels-as opposed to the usual silver plating-was somehow prone to chemical break-down. Any other collectors seen this before?
Well, hopefully this is the end of it: I got myself another “Dayla Special” so I’m happy for now, an I’m keeping this replacement in a different case! Even so, the mystery may nag at me for a while. Hit me up if any of y’all have had an experience like this and know what might have caused it and-more important-how to prevent it!
That is so odd about the discoloration. It certainly couldn’t be humidity. I hope you don’t see it in other models! I haven’t seen this on any of mine but I don’t have a model quiet like this.