Hot Summer Nights at Drag City-2025

It’s pretty amazing seeing your toys come to life like this based on nothing more than photographs and written descriptions! It adds a new dimension to The Lore of Drag City and the huge fleet of Thunderjets that race there. The images you see in this post were all generated by using the descriptions of the track, the cars, and the events that you can read about right here on this blog!

Yeah, right now AI is fun; its like a new toy. It won’t be fun anymore in a year or two when we have become AI’s toy…and it will happen without us even realizing it. For now, though, I’m sitting here looking out my window as evening comes, and its well past 7:00pm; only a few short weeks ago it would been dark by now. Looking back over the last year or so of posts here at “thunderjetheaven.com” has got me thinking about how long its been since I’ve run a full tournament at track.

I’ve done a lot of work on the diorama, including construction of the carnival and a lot of additional cars, peeps, and other things to look at. I’ve done some racing too, especially with The Super Stocks with friends. I had Jason try his hand at the trigger for the first time a couple of nights ago; he seemed to think it was OK, but in his mind, its not MarioKart 😛 Fair enough, I guess.

Over the last year I’ve added some more Auto World T-Jets to the “overstock” area, acquired some really cool and really rare original Aurora T-Jets for The Road Crew, and done plenty of repairs and maintenance on all my roughly 400 slotties. But it has been a loooong time since I’ve picked out 64 or even 32 cars and lined them up for a full tournament! I just don’t have the time anymore; there’s too many other things to do. House work, yard work, maintenance on the 1:1 scale cars…and there’s hanging out with friends, too; that’s important. And of course there’s work: lots of that. I do more of that than I used too, kids; that’s the price I pay for advancement. I suppose I should enjoy it while I still have a job.

Summer is upon us, and at my house summer is the best time to race! My tiled basement stays cool even in the hottest weather. So far the late spring here has been remarkably mild and pleasant, but when the heat hits, it will be relentless; when I come home from a long hot day at work, its a great pleasure to take a short cool shower, pull on some shorts and a T-shirt, and descend to my happy place to get some music on and fire up the track! Which leads to the burning question: will there be any tournaments this summer? Well, I sure hope so! They are most likely going to go down on weekday evenings, and ever since breaking each fleet of cars into groups of 32, a race isn’t as long as it used to be, but with the time I have, it will still take several days to finish one.

One of the things I want to experiment with is changing up my scoring methods; ever since I started, I’ve been going with the simplist format there is: whichever of the 2 cars has the fastest time around the track for the number of laps specified (which varies by race, usually 5 but some formats are longer) is the winner and advances to the next round. It works, but I’m thinking I’d like to implement a points system of some kind to keep things more interesting and shake up the results. Thing is, with a race between only 2 cars on 2 lanes, I’m not sure what that would look like. Gonna have to put some thoght into it. Open to ideas from other slot-heads! How do you score your races against the clock?

Unfortunately, we’re already too late in the year for the full complement of tournaments I used to run: the Banzai Runner sports car races, some of the various Muscle Car Rumbles, even the Dale Pratley Memorial Challenge, have already been missed on the calendar. The next big event by calendar is the Independence Day Muscle Car Blowout, and then of course the Secret Oktober series this fall, which entails both muscle cars and sports cars. Some of the “one off” events such as the “Zombie Apocalypse” and the “No Mercy Memorial Day Muscle Car Brawl” may not return, because – in the case of that second one, at least – Memorial Day is upon us, and I’ve already got more to do this weekend than I can cram into the hours I have.

This “adulting” thing is such a drag. How nice to know we’ll all soon be replaced by machines and have all the leisure time we need…and with no worries about keeping the bills paid, right, one-percenters? Oh, wait…maybe there’s still a few concerns with that… Oh well! Like I said, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. So let’s do what we do best here at Drag City and take a look back! From March of 2021, here’s the video intro to the first muscle car tournament I ran when my fleet of slotties finally hit 64 cars! A lot of changes here; many of these cars are long gone from the fleet completely or, in more cases, have been changed or modified significantly over the ensuing 4+ years since this video was made. It sure was fun, though!

There will be time this summer to bring out the customized Auto World fleets; the tournments are likely to be far fewer and take longer to complete, but as a visitor to this blog, you won’t notice that: you’ll get the results and the cool stories and videos that go along with them! We should all enjoy this summer, dear readers, for by the time this season rolls around again, the world may look very different. So enjoy your own Thunderjets and Hot Wheels and whatever other scale model hobbies you enjoy, and I’ll see you here at the blog with reports from the track as the summer 1986 racing season continues at Drag City!