The photos you see accompanying this post were taken on Easter Sunday, on a daytime cruise in “The Holy Grail,” my ‘56 Chevy 210 sedan that some of you have seen on this blog. Although I rarely drive the car these days due to concerns about its safety in the traffic conditions in my region, this was a special occasion, for more than one reason. My main man Patrick, who was visiting me that day, convinced me to take the car out. The weather that day was beautiful, and we had a nice leisurely cruise around the area, including a drive to beautiful old town Golden for an outdoor snack and a stop @ Red Rocks amphitheater.
Those of you who have experienced tremendous loss in your lives know that grief is like a monster that devours everything: it destroys concentration, sleep, appetite, and joy. It is nearly impossible to find refuge from it, and even when you can, escaping it is usually only possible for short periods of time. This is where I find myself now, as I write these words.
Drag City Raceway has been completely silent for nearly 4 weeks now. There has been no racing, no attention to the diorama, no new legends. There have been some new additions to the slot car collection, but my attention has been elsewhere to the degree that I have been unable to share them here.
Nothing taking a pic of your friend taking a pic.
On a few occasions, I have stated that there are things that are not appropriate to discuss on a blog about slot cars and toy car collecting. This recent event in my life is one of those things, and going into details would be unlikely to interest my readers. What I will say is that I am currently deep within a chasm of grief resulting from the loss of someone very dear to me, someone for whom the depth and breadth of my love was essential to my happiness.
Yes, it was a beautiful day…but don’t let that smile fool you…
The grief is compounded by the horrible realization that my own behavior, and the way I handled the situation, is at least partly responsible for the loss. People my age like to believe that we have reached a degree of life experience and maturity that allows us to deal properly with these situations. And yet, no matter how old or wise we think we’ve become, we sometimes find that we can still be thrown for a loop, making decisions that feel right at the time, only to look back weeks or days later with a terrible realization…the kind of realization that leads you to look in the mirror and say out loud to your reflection, “My God, what have I done?”
In relation to Drag City Raceway, this loss requires an enormous number of changes and continuity revisions to the stories that I have built around the track and the cars, revisions that I have neither the strength nor the bandwidth to engage in right now. As for what this means to the future of the track, and of this blog…at this time, I am unable to say.
Make no mistake, dear readers: this is a life-changing event. Nothing is going to be the same now, and I have to recalibrate and redesign all the plans that I’ve been making over the last year and a half. Any of you who may visit this blog regularly know that I have been debating for some time whether or not to leave Colorado – and thus (obviously) my house – which would’ve necessitated the closure and deconstruction of the track. Only a few months ago, I thought that I had reached the decision to stay, and was finalizing the planning stages of the expansion to the track diorama that I’ve been writing about for years.
Now, closing the book on this volume of my life and attempting to open a new one somewhere else is very much back on the table, and probably even likely. However, it’s really impossible to tell. It’s not a good idea to try to make major life decisions in a state like I’m currently in. My efforts now must all be focused on just trying to make sense of what has happened, and in trying to remain functional on a day-to-day basis.
And that is taking all the bandwidth I have. This is why there have been no posts on this blog for so long, and there are unlikely to be for the foreseeable future. I know there must be an end to this darkness at some point; that eventually I will again feel the fun and joy that the activities I blog about here have brought me. But right now, I can’t see it.
My Easter ended with dinner at my home shared with 2 friends who have stuck by me through the years, through the difficult and challenging times we’ve all had. This served as a reminder to focus on what we have rather than on what we’ve lost. Sometimes that’s difficult, but these days it seems more important than ever.
I hope that you and your loved ones had a good holiday and are still enjoying your own versions of the hobbies this blog is about. I may be back at some point, but as I said above, there’s no way to say when. For now, racing at Drag City, and the blog about it, are on indefinite hiatus while I try to work some things out. As for you, dear readers, hold on to the good things for dear life, and never fail to let your loved ones know that they are loved.
My name is Roxy Calder. I’m writing this down because Drag City has a habit of turning facts into legend overnight, and The Outlaw Garage has become one of those places people talk about more than they actually understand. A reputation like theirs attracts every kind of projection—envy, superstition, hero worship, and the occasional outright lie. So I did what I always do when the pit lane gets loud: I went looking for receipts.
“Outlaw” is the kind of word that makes people lean in—half excited, half suspicious—like they’re hoping for a scandal. That’s not what this is. The Outlaw Garage isn’t a criminal enterprise hiding behind a cool name; it’s a small, stubborn shop that built its reputation the hardest way possible: by getting results in public, over and over, where the stopwatch can’t be bribed and excuses don’t survive the heat.
Located right next door to Drag City’s main spectator entrance, the unassuming Outlaw Garage looks pretty ordinary under the noon-day sun…but looks can be deceiving!
And here’s the part the modern world keeps forgetting: old cars aren’t computers. They don’t behave because a program told them to. They have moods—good days, bad days, and days where they run like magic for reasons you can’t quite explain. Most people try to tame that with shortcuts, charts, and bravado. The Outlaw Garage does it the old way—by understanding what a machine is trying to say, and having the patience to listen until it finally tells the truth.
From the street, the shop doesn’t look like much: three bays, brick painted white over blue, green awnings that throw just enough shade to make the interior look darker than it is. A corrugated roof that hums when the wind picks up off the flats. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could drive past it on Bear Valley Road without ever slowing down.
But people do slow down. Not because of the building, but because of what keeps happening inside it.
The Outlaw Garage @ 1:64…A day in the life!
On a race weekend, the driveway never really empties. Cars arrive with problems they’ve already paid someone else to fix. Engines come in quiet and leave sounding sharper, tighter, like they’ve remembered what they were built for. A driver might show up frustrated and leave an hour later saying nothing at all, which at Drag City usually means everything worked.
The Outlaw Garage @ 1:1!
None of it looks dramatic while it’s happening. The legend only starts later, when the lap times show up.
Restoration King: Shop manager Metzger examines a recently arrived “barn find” brought in by a well-heeled customer
A Shop That Grew With the Track
When Drag City began changing shape—first by expanding beyond the original strip, and later by redesigning, relocating pits, and rethinking how people and cars moved through the facility—the Outlaw Garage changed with it.
The Outlaw Garage at DC Mk. II in the late 1960s
In its earliest life it was defined by proximity to the work: an extension of the old Chevron bays that became the first practical pit nerve center when the road course era took hold, before the official pits were moved in 1967 and the dual bays rebranded as a dedicated tuning shop.
But Drag City didn’t freeze in 1967. As the track matured through later rebuilds and reconfigurations—especially in the modern Mk IV layout—the “front door” of the facility shifted, and with it the gravitational pull of the entrance gates, staging areas, and public flow.
The result is that today the Outlaw Garage occupies a different role than it once did. Instead of serving as the improvised pit complex of the early road-course era, the shop now sits just outside the modern entrance ecosystem—where spectators arrive, entrants queue, and the business end of the track meets its public face.
Which means that sooner or later, everyone notices it.
The Small Shop Problem
There is one detail about the Outlaw Garage that comes up again and again: it doesn’t look big enough. Three bays, a modest office, and just enough room out front to shuffle cars around; for a place that quietly services everything from vintage racers to exotic road machines, it feels improbably small.
The practical explanation is simple enough. The crew maintains an off-site annex elsewhere in town, where spare engines, bodywork, and long-term projects are stored between races. It’s the kind of logistical solution any working race shop eventually adopts.
Burning the midnight oil: the shop’s expert fabricator Hank “Stitch” Merriman is also an expert engine builder
When I asked about it, Brad Metzger confirmed as much with a shrug. “You can’t run a place like this without somewhere to stack things.”
But if you listen to the rumors long enough, you’ll hear a different version. Some people say the real work happens “out there.” The mechanics just laugh at that. According to everyone who actually knows the shop, whatever makes the Outlaw Garage special happens right here—in three cramped bays under a roof that rattles when the desert wind comes through Wardglenn.
Cal “Torque” Dobbins and Enzo “Z” Marchelli take a suds break after hours
The Man Who Runs the Floor
Shop proprietor B. Metzger
If the Outlaw Garage has a center of gravity, it’s the man who runs the floor: Brad Metzger.
Metzger isn’t the kind of mechanic who fills a room. He doesn’t need to. He listens more than he talks, and when he does speak it’s usually because he’s already decided what the problem is. There’s no performance to it, no attempt to impress. Just a quiet certainty that tends to make arguments stop before they start.
One driver told me Metzger once diagnosed an ignition issue without opening the hood. Another said he called a failure before it happened, then fixed it before the next heat. Metzger, when I asked him about either story, just shook his head. “It’s not magic,” he said. “It’s just paying attention.”
The Outlaw Crew
Metzger doesn’t run the place alone. Seven other mechanics make up the core floor crew at Outlaw Garage—each one with a specialty, and all of them working from the same set of fundamentals.
ABOVE LEFT: Chevrolet master Cal Dobbins with “Team ’67 Heaven” member The Sultan after a race-prep refresh for owner/driver Brody Banner. ABOVE RIGHT: Mopar specialist Rico Santoro and Daphne Lusk, proud of the completion of a ’71 Hemi ‘Cuda clone
Cal “Torque” Dobbins handles Chevrolets and all things GM, the kind of expert who can hear something wrong before you can describe it. Rico Santoro is the Mopar man, known for building big-block engines that feel like they’re carrying a grudge. Miles Hargrove takes care of the Porsches, methodical and precise, the one people trust when reliability matters more than anything else. Enzo “Z” Marchelli works on the Italian cars—Ferraris especially—treating carburetors and ignition systems with a level of attention that borders on ritual.
Working the dyno! Metzger and Dobbins with a C3 (left) and Lusk and Merriman with an Austin Healey 3000 (right)
Daphne Lusk handles the British machines, Jaguars included, with a reputation for solving problems other shops write off as “just how those cars are.” Hank “Stitch” Merriman fabricates whatever doesn’t exist yet, quietly turning raw metal into parts that look like they were always meant to be there. And Leonard Pike—Lenny to everyone in the shop—is the machinist, the one who measures everything twice and then checks the tools he used to measure it.
ABOVE, RIGHT: Dobbins, the shop’s Chevrolet and GM specialist, doing a 327 rebuild under the watchful eye of master machinist Leonard Pike. ABOVE, LEFT: Even a “strong woman” needs a hand! Dobbins helps Lusk heave a rebuilt rear axle into position under a Series II Jaguar E-Type coupe
Porsche specialist Miles Hargrove and Leonard Pike fire up a modified and freshly rebuilt 911 as their boss observes the results.
Why It Works
“The Ferrari Whisperer.” Italian car expert Enzo Marchelli with Metzger, divining the mysteries of the Columbo short-block V12
Ask ten different people why the Outlaw Garage gets the results it does, and you’ll get ten different answers. Secret techniques. Special parts. A trick nobody else has figured out. The truth is less exciting—and harder to copy. They understand the fundamentals: Fuel. Air. Spark. Heat. Friction. Timing.
And maybe more importantly, they understand that not every engine behaves the same way, even when it’s built the same way. Cars of the eras that race at Drag City have personalities; anyone who’s spent enough time around them knows that. Some respond to adjustment immediately. Others resist. Some need to be coaxed or pushed. Others need to be left alone. Most modern shops don’t have the time—or the patience—for that kind of nuance.
Santoro and Pike discuss plans for a ’68 Charger R/T brought in by a customer to be upgraded from a road car to a track-capable monster
Outlaw does.
They listen. They adjust. They test. They repeat. And when they’re done, the car doesn’t just run; it runs the way it was meant to.
There’s a reason people talk about the Outlaw Garage the way they do. Not because it’s mysterious, but because it isn’t. Everything they do happens out in the open, in full view of anyone willing to pay attention. The problem is that most people don’t know what they’re looking at.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the good fortune to find a couple of very distressed older Tyco cars for sale at extremely low prices. As much as I enjoy rejuvenating and restoring old slot cars, I didn’t exactly set out looking for junk; but I did think it would be interesting to acquire a couple of examples of another brand and type of slot car just to see what they’re like. I’ve done this before: see my detailed posts on my first Atlas slot car here and my first Faller AMS car here. However, unlike with Atlas and Faller, I have some backstory with Tyco, and I bet some of you do as well.
My choice of the Thunderjet platform wasn’t entirely organic, owing to the way I got into this hobby, something I’ve described in detail on several occasions. I picked Thunderjets primarily because of the way they look: I feel they are among the most accurate representations of real cars that you can get in slot format. Along with that came the huge variety of different body styles and customization parts that were available for them. The third consideration was the ease of maintenance, and how durable and long-lasting they have proven to be.
Now, since this is a blog mostly for slot car enthusiasts, I probably don’t need to launch into a full dissertation on the history of Tyco, because I suspect a lot of you reading this know as much about it as I do, or more. Telling the whole story would be preaching to the choir, and nobody likes that. But there are a couple of elements of Tyco’s history that are of particular interest to me as a Matchbox and Hot Wheels collector, so I’m going to run through a quick synopsis of what I know so far….
It began with the S line of 1963–64. The “S” stood for Speedways, and this was the company’s first real step into HO electric racing. From there, Tyco leapt into the performance age with TycoPro in 1970 and the refined TycoPro II soon after. The line then evolved through the later consumer-performance generations—HP2/Curve Hugger, Magnum 440, HP7, and the magnet-heavy 440X2, which became the signature late-classic Tyco chassis for many collectors. In corporate terms, the next chapter came when Tyco bought Matchbox in 1992, creating a distinct Matchbox-Tyco era, followed by Mattel’s acquisition of Tyco in 1997, which folded both Tyco and Matchbox into Mattel’s empire. Under Mattel, the old Tyco 440 family lingered on in modified form as Electric Hot Wheels / 440X3, but after that the line effectively passed out of active production and into the collector-legacy era, where it remains today: no longer a living product family, but still one of the great names in HO slot-car history.
Tyco S lineup from the mid-1960s
And so, precisely because my choice of the Thunderjet as my preferred platform was not entirely organic, it’s interesting for me to look back on my own childhood and remember that my initiation into slot cars was actually via Tyco Pro. That was the format I first had, the one that first brought slot cars into my life, so it seems only fitting that the Tyco brand should have a place in my collection. And yet, up to this point, it really hasn’t. So…
My 1st TYCO “S” slot car!
Yes, it’s rough—but it was cheap.
The seller advertised this one as-is, with runner status unknown, and it has obvious paint damage and body fatigue. But for the price being asked, I thought it would be cool to acquire one of these even if it turned out to be completely dead, just to take it apart and see how it was constructed. This is the natural curiosity of the enthusiast mechanic/engineer, and I willingly gave in to it. I was quite excited when it arrived.
So, let’s de-construct and examine!
The Jaguar E-Type body is worse for wear, but it’s a better-looking rendition of this car than many!
Just as the photos I’ve seen online predicted, the chassis looks a lot like an Marusan/Atlas design…so much so that one wonders how they got away with it! The in-line motor and worm-and-wheel final drive mimic Atlas almost exactly, and even the pick-ups shoes, with their built-in spring, have a very similar design. Likewise, the “S” mimics one of Atlas’ worst features, a closed drive line that is untouchable unless you take the body off the chassis! For reasons I described in detail here, this may look neat and tight to the eye, but it’s a bad design; with no way to “jog” the motor or axle other than just rapping on the car itself, there’s no easy way to free a stuck motor…and that tends to happen to slot cars kind of a lot, ya know?
The Tyco S seen with one of the common variations of the Atlas chassis
There are many variations on the Atlas design over the years, as there are with the German Faller AMS chassis, and I see strong commonalities between all of these, as all used an inline motor “block” around which the chassis was built. The biggest weakness I see in all these cars is in the axle mounting, where it seems that the plastic chassis anchoring the axles is a weakness, as the mounting blocks are potentially fragile and if one of them breaks, the chassis is scrap; the strength of the axle mounts is another superiority of the T-Jet design. Tyco, however, did something different here, although I have to confess I don’t know why, and here’s where would ask if my readers can enlighten me. Unlike all the others, the Tyco has a pivoting front axle. On mine it appears to be locked into a forward position but it clearly was originally made to be steerable. What was the purpose of this? As best I can tell, the original design called for some sort of steering system that was perhaps never utilized, or maybe was so only on some versions. Anybody out there know?
A group of in-liners: Tyco S in the center flanked by Atlas (left) and Faller AMS (right)
Finally at the rear of the chassis we have another interesting innovation: a weight designed to fit directly over the rear wheels to give the car more traction. That’s clearly the function of the heavy plastic block that fits over the rear axle on either side of the worm gear: its a trick bit of machining, and its heavy enough that it made me think it was metal at first.
A genuine flat tire
The Tyco S naturally had their own wheel and tire design, as all manufacturers did, but sadly this is probably the biggest weakness of this platform today: the tires on these old cars have dried up into hard brittle pucks; all the pliability is gone, so there is no removing them without shattering them, and so far, I have found nothing in my tire stash from all my various customs that looks like they may replace them; the hubs are far larger than a T-Jet; T-jet truck tires, later Tyco tires, and even Road Race Replicas and Vincent variations won’t fit them. That’s a shame, since my purchase not only has the dried-out tires but also has one on the rear with a pronounced flat spot.
Does anyone know if any enterprising slotists out there have made reproductions that I haven’t found yet, or has found an existing tire that fits?
I’m still looking, and intend to try some Matchbox “regular wheel”-era tires-those will be plastic of course, not ideal but better than nothing-and even thinking of seeing if there’s anything from the 1:43 scale world that might work. I’ll experiment, and if I find a solution here before someone else proposes one, I’ll let you know!
The heat damaged window insert didn’t look promising!
Now then, can we get it running?! The condition of the window insert that fell out of the Jaguar body was not encouraging, distorted and discolored as it was at the lower front edge by heat! I figure that was a bad sign, and the motor did have a hint of that dreaded smell, but I worked on it anyway: de-corrosion with Tarn-X, thorough cleaning and oiling, sanding and brightening the pick-up shoes and their mounts with fine sandpaper and a polishing stone on the Dremel. Of course, the motor block is well-nigh impenetrable, and I didn’t want to get into taking that apart, since an attempt to do the same with a Faller AMS resulted in a lost part that I never was able to find and ruined that motor! I would if I had too, but it turns out I didn’t; after a lot of careful cleaning and oiling, I put it to a 9V and got a sign of life! It took a while – over an hour of coaxing – but little by little I was able to restore connectivity from the pick-up shoes to the motor and eventually I got it going; first it would move only a few inches, then a couple of feet, and before too long, I had it doing a circuit! WOW, it works! I didn’t expect that!
Bringing it back to life! Running sans-body, first without and then with the “weight block” over the rear axle
I cleaned up the battered body as best I could. The Tyco S is held together by 2 screws exactly like a T-Jet (so here they borrowed Aurora’s weakest design point!) and naturally the posts were both a mess; the rear one is cracked in half completely and the front one, while in tact, is split in 2 places and is just barely holding, so this body’s days on the track are over without some fabrication; even so, I polished her up and removed the grime “baked in” over years. The paint is badly damaged as you can see, but here again I’m choosing “patina” over restoration and going to let it stay in the “barn find” condition it’s in. Once done, I put it all back together as best I could, and decided to put it on the track to see if she’d play along…
It lives, IT LIVES!!!
At the end of this experiment, I was so taken with the Tyco S that I decided to spend some fairly big money acquiring another, because a rare and beautiful example came up for sale at a price I thought was reasonable in context, and I grabbed it. This latest find is in great condition, but in order to see what it is, you’ll have to tune in for a future post! Suffice to say that bringing this car back to life was a blast, and once I work out something for the tires/wheels, I’ll have a pair of Tyco S cars to run on The HO Highway!
Going “Pro”…for the first time in 50 years!
My next acquisition from Tyco-land was a real throwback to your humble blogger’s own childhood: now we’re going back to my own personal past to the very first slot cars I ever owned: the “brass pan” Tyco Pros! I found this Chaparral in the 1976 Bicentennial celebration colors selling for next to nothing because its missing several body parts: the wing and the window insert are all history…kind of odd considering the rest of the body seems to be in great condition. The seller advertised it by saying “This car runs when it wants too.” That sounded like a challenge, so for $15, I grabbed it, and within a week was holding the first Tyco Pro my hands have touched since I was 7 or 8 years old!
The Tyco Pro design is elaborate; at a glance it appears to be fragile but its actually quite robust, the one exception being the ever present danger of those tiny wires breaking one of their connections. I’ve brought this up before in the context of the lighting wires for the Thunderjet “Flamethrowers”: I don’t know who out there has the equipment or the skill to solder wires this small, but I sure don’t, so if any of these connections were to ever break, my own Tyco chassis would be history.
These chassis were made in Hong Kong, and I can only imagine that the factory procedure to assemble these was intense; I bet those tiny solders were all done by hand! You could never do something like that economically now…well, at least not until AI robots become sophisticated enough to bring that kind of productivity back! The pivoting, self-centering head and elongated “slot” was abandoned on later designs for a much more conventional metal pin, but seemed like a clever idea to give the car some steering ability and make it more “tossable” in turns, giving your racing activities a feel of reality that other brands at the time couldn’t match. And we all remember the “plunger” style pick-ups, a remarkably intricate design that can be problematic to fix but works well when it works at all! That’s where my purchase was failing…
Close-ups of the elaborate pivoting head design of the Tyco Pro with all its delicate connective wiring
If I pressed down hard on the front the “head” would make contact and the motor would run, but left alone, there was not enough pressure to get a connection. What to do with this, then? Well first, another de-corrosion and cleaning on all the parts…and then, an inspiration to add a tiny amount of dielectric grease to the shafts of those plungers to try to tame the wobble in their bearings that high mileage had likely caused. The combination worked; after about an hour of careful cleaning and experimentation, I had her reliably running!
The next thing to address was the rear tires, which of course were hard and brittle, and one of them shattered when I removed it. I tried a set of Road Race Replicas silicones, and those fit and worked, but they were a little too short and tilted the chassis backward enough that contact problems at the front began to return, so I hunted around through my parts bin again. It took a while, but I found a pair of rears that I believe were originally from a set of AJ’s aluminum wheels that fit very nicely! They are a hair thicker and a hair taller than the originals, but they fit and looked decent, and although they themselves are old and a bit “out of round” and don’t have the best traction, it’s nice to know that reproduction tires that will fit these Tyco Pros are available today from vendors like JAG Hobbies. These AJ’s tires would do for now, though, to get her on the track!
All cleaned up, lubed and oiled, ready to rock!
Like many Pro era cars, the Chaparral coupe has lighting, and the tiny bulb in the chassis not only worked, it worked very well: it lit up extremely strong and bright – much brighter than the same bulb on my lone working T-Jet Flamethrower – and once it was worked into the little recess in the plastic of the headlight “manifold,” it looked great on the track! So, let’s see what she can do!
When Tyco advertised the Pro models as the fastest slot cars on the market, they weren’t kidding! These things move! Their speed might not be impressive by modern standards, but they leave the early T-Jets in the dust! Aurora would of course response to this with the AFX line just a year or two later, which started the trend of what were once “HO” slot cars getting bigger and bigger. I was very pleased, however, to find that this Chaparral is almost the perfect size and scale to co-mingle with my vast collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars! They are a little smaller than I remember them being, and while they are a hair bigger in comparison to original T-Jets, they look right at home on the Drag City diorama!
This raises a new question: where in my world do these Tyco Pros belong: on the HO Highway, or at the “big track?”
The Tyco Chaparral 2A coupe alongside a much newer rendering of the same car from Hot Wheels
Well, considering they don’t have traction magnets, they don’t like the banked turn, although I was able to get this one moving fast enough to negotiate the high bank of lane 2; it won’t do the low bank of lane 1, so although the elongated slot design likes to hang up on the older Model Motoring track, that is probably where she belongs. She’ll out run all the T-Jets there, though, even the “Tuff Ones!” Perhaps some of the Dash Motorsports chassis will keep up…we shall see, and it will be fun finding out!
Having seen this, I’m now turning my attention to some of the really cool early Pro bodies that I never had as a kid, such as the Lamborghini Miura P400 I mentioned here, as well as a few others like the Ferrari 512M, the Iso Grifo, and the DeTomaso Pantera. I also want to recapture the first two slot cars I ever owned exactly as I owned them: the Porsche 908 in silver and red and the 917K in light blue and orange. And there’s a Datsun 240Z in red and white that I definitely want again, as the one I had in childhood was the fastest slotty I owned: I beat all the neighborhood kid’s Pros and AFX’s with that one, and while that has zilch to do with the body, its a fun memory that makes me want it back! These cars also look really slick with the white rear tires they made for a time, so I’ll be on the lookout for some of those as well. So, I can assure you that there’s a few more Tyco Pros in my near future!
And so, there’s some thoughts from my “week with Tyco.” Hope you enjoyed this little diversion into a look at the competition, Thunderjet fans! I personally think these early Tycos are really cool, even if the Pro chassis design was a little too clever for their own good. More conventional designs were coming in the next series, the HP2 “Curve Hugger,” which introduced traction magnets and lost the elaborate “steering head” pick-up design, but there’s just something cool about these early “brass pan” cars that recalls a time when Tyco was the brand to beat on the track! Competition is good: it drives innovation and its exciting as well! And competition and excitement are what racing is all about!
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.
The “Odds & Ends” tray: 6 Auto World X-Tractions, 1 Auto World 4-Gear, 1 TomyAFX Mega-G, the balance: Tyco HP7 and 440-X2
My 1st slot car set came with these 2 cars: I’ll never forget it! It was X-mas of 1976: I was 5 years old.
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.
The troublesome T-Bird: this Tyco body won’t stay on the chassis, and attempts to make it do so resulted in a partly striped ring gear I now have to replace.
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.
My only Auto World 4-Gears – only 1 ever opened and used, and a surplus chassis I’ll do something with…someday
TycoPro track from the ’70s: I once had that red brick serpentine piece!
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.
Another piece from my childhood; I had this noisemaker on my original track as well!
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.
Tyco Iso Grifo, one I missed in childhood and that I want reeeeal bad now!
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!
the muscle pair: I’m sorry they didn’t make the ’71 ‘Cuda for the T-Jet platform!
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!
Saturday Morning Cartoons & coffee with the Bear Family!
Now don’t get me wrong, dear readers: I’m not complaining! But it is weird; the entire Rocky Mountain region has just experienced the most weatherless winter I’ve seen in my 26 years here. The Denver area where your humble blogger resides got maybe 5 days of snow the entire season, and 2 of those days were little more than a light dusting…but then again, if you happen to reside on the East Coast, you probably don’t want to hear that! Seems the eastern seaboard got all our snow this year…
Any casual golfers out there? You might want to consider a new hobby…like, slot car racing, for example!
That’s going to make this summer definitely not fun for the entire Southwest: CO, AZ, NV and CA are all facing down strict water rationing this summer-probably UT and NM as well, so get ready for brown yards and short showers…and I’d hate to be a golfer in a western state right now! But it could be worse; at least we’re not getting death rained down upon us from A-10’s and F-35s.
This scene on the track perimeter looks good, even though the Corvette is a wee bit too big in comparison to the old Lesney Matchbox #18 Field Car (aka IH Scout) towing it…
So, on this unsneasonably warm Saturday, I find myself enjoying my morning coffee and Saturday Morning Cartoons (that’s capitalized because it’s a thing) and awaiting the arrival of one of my oldest friends, who’s winging his way in from CA to visit me for the weekend…that is, if he can get a flight…circumstances there are being affected-as is everything, it seems-by the topic I broached in my previous post, which is probably why I’m feeling extra nostalgic today!
So, on this “Not Much To Say Satur-day,” join me as we head back to what CA was like in 1987-a different time, a different world-and mess around with some of the “chess pieces” to see if I can’t keep things interesting on the diorama, adding some more cars and changing up some of the tableaus! Its a fun, low-cost, low-consequence way to pass the time, and its reminiscent of how a lot of us spent our boyhoods in our rooms, basements, or back yards in those days when we were more concerned about our toys than about water rationing or the economic fallout of the latest war in the middle east…
The latest “Tableau Shuffle” at Drag City started out of a desire to find a good place for Roxy’s tan Toyota FJ-60 Land Cruiser, represented here by this excellent Hot Wheels Premium “Car Culture” model. Though she’s currently in the passenger’s seat of your HB’s Chevy K-5 Blazer in the parking lot, her ute is at the track filled with her camera and recording gear as your intrepid team of track reporters make their way around town gathering images, data and stories for your enjoyment here @ thunderjetheaven.com. I decided that the infield area right behind the local San Diego station news van was the perfect pitch, but it meant moving that cool Hurst “Trackside Service” ’59 Chevy Sedan Delivery, which-as always-started a chain reaction…The biggest changes are to the inspection area, where another “tightening up” of vehicles has been done to add the Hurst “Trackside Service” sdn delivery to the row of service trucks unloading parts for the racers; this allowed one of the layout’s coolest cars, this highly detailed Cobra Daytona coupe, to migrate to the busy area around Turn 11, “Station East,” where a row of extremely awesome cars of varying styles are frantically having last-minute fixes and improvements done (or, perhaps, cheats removed or obscured!) right before inspection on race day! The red Ferrari 250LM is a migration from the inspection station parking area.And wouldn’t you know it, that “tightening up” made room for another car! I’ve been wanting to add this Treasure Hunt Riley & Scott Mk III racer to the layout since I got it, and here it is, complete with its driver maybe a little too eager to go, already fully suited up with helmet before even leaving the inspection station for the paddock!Aaaand since moving the Ferrari 250LM opened up that end parking space at the inspection station for the Jaguar XJ12C racer, its place was taken by the addition of this super-cool Hot Wheels Honda CR-X, a car that represents what would have been the “new blood” at DCR in this era!And last in the chain reaction: those earlier moves shuffled some things around in the paddock as well, so the flared racing Mini now sits next to the red Porsche 356 in the paddock, although I’m not super pleased with the scale comparison here; the theme is good, but I may move some more things around here to improve the “forced perspective.” Better in scale is the Ford Lotus Cortina in the conga line moving from the inspection station to the paddock, which looks right at home between an alloy 300SL and a Ferrari P4
And so again, a slow and lazy weekend day without much to report, but I enjoy these slow days because I get precious few of them anymore. No racing this weekend, since I’ve got guests to “entertain,” but the track will be roaring again soon enough, because racing reports and other updates are always just around the bend at Drag City!
