The Platform Question – A Flashback to the Early Days of Drag City

Last weekend, one of my friends was supposed to come by on Sunday morning and race with me. Unfortunately, he flaked, as this particular friend often does. This abandonment actually led to an interesting side excursion into some of the long-neglected pieces of my collection that date from the earliest days of my slot car hobby.

The reason for this was that Rob likes trucks, and he wanted to race a truck, so he said he’d only race with me if I provided him with a truck for the track. At the time, the only ThunderJet-compatible truck body that I was aware of was the Auto World reproduction of the late-’60s Chevy Blazer, but I did find a really cool body for the AFX/Tyco platform: a Dodge Ram painted in Shelby blue with dual white stripes. I acquired this as a body-only and then mounted it on an AW X-Traction chassis that I bought separately. Obviously, I couldn’t have one lone truck racing against cars, so as a competitor for it, I also bought a copy of the AFX GMC pickup in red and mounted that on the same type of chassis.

So now, flash back to one of my very earliest posts on this blog, that of The Platform Question, and you can see me threshing out in real time which version and manufacturer of slot cars I was going to use.

I’ve mentioned many times that the first slot car set I ever got, at the age of 5, was a Tyco Pro set. A couple of years later, after my family bought their first house, a local neighbor kid that I raced with for a while also had a Tyco set. He was a few years older than me, and when he graduated from slot cars to RC cars, he gave me a lot of his Tyco stuff, since he had lost interest in it. I do remember having a couple of AFX cars as well, but my track, controllers, and most of my cars were Tyco.

If you read my earliest posts right here on the blog, I picked the ThunderJet as my platform, and I explained exactly why. I don’t regret the choice, but as time goes on, and I look for new things to try to keep things interesting, I’m taking a second look at both Tyco and AFX, starting with my own!

What’s interesting about this is that Tyco Pro, Tyco CurveHuggers and HPs, and AFX were the toys of my own youth; ThunderJets were actually before my time.; they were already out of production by the time I was old enough to start racing slot cars. I never had any as a kid. ThunderJets seem to be the most valuable of the major vintage slot car platforms today, and to have the most adherents, but the AFX cars certainly have their fans, and some of the old Tyco pieces are selling for remarkably high prices now.

So that Sunday evening, I pulled some of these cars out of this tray and put them on the track and ran them around a few times. The Auto World X-Traction chassis-AW’s reproduction of the AFX “Magna Traction” format of the mid 1970s-are certainly faster than the ThunderJets, there’s no question about that: faster, smoother, and quieter. The Tycos are fast too, but make a little more noise, with a little more drama, than the silky-smooth AFX. Neither platform ever satisfied me with body choices: they always looked too big and poorly proportioned to me, which was why I lost interest in them. But there’s no denying their performance.

Slot car enthusiasts can – and do – argue until the cows come home about which motor design is superior: the pancake or the in-line. I do think that the in-line motor design has the potential for higher speed and greater performance, but the pancake motor design, and the chassis that accommodates it, seem simpler and significantly easier for the home mechanic to clean, upgrade, and maintain, and that’s worth a lot, especially over the miles and through the years.

But in the end-for a lot of us, anyway-it isn’t just about the numbers: we all have our favorites, we all have our memories, we all have what looks and feels right to us. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but there is a great deal of fun to be had in owning and driving and modifying and restoring all of them!

I’ll be doing a deeper dive on Tyco this coming weekend since I have some new acquisitions to show y’all, and some questions to ask you, dear readers, who likely know more about this topic than I do! So tune in again this weekend and check out what’s new and different at Drag City!