One of the first things people say-and you may have already said it!-is: “Your track is a road course; why do you call it ‘Drag City?’”

Good question! There are 2 reasons for this, and here they are!

1. The name was inspired by one of my favorite songs of the “Surf/Drag” era by Jan & Dean.
2. It’s a road course now, but in the very beginning, it was actually a drag strip.

The second of these reasons is part of the lore of the track, which I will describe in painstaking detail in “The History of DRAG CITY.” The first reason goes back to my childhood; as a fan of the surf/drag music of the early 60’s, I have a large collection-both original vinyl and digital reissues-of this genre, covering the well known and the obscure. The song “Drag City” falls in the former category, having been released as the title track of Jan & Dean’s late 1963 album and which became the 2^nd of the duo’s 16 top 40 hits released during the years of their peak popularity (1963-64). I’ve loved this song since I heard it on a Liberty Records 45 at the age of 10 or 11, and when I built my first slot track, the name was just there; I didn’t have to decide on it; it happened naturally. If you’ve seen the home page of this blog you know I’ve quoted the lyrics of this song on that page.

In 2020, the rebirth of my interest in this hobby has so far resulted in four separate tracks, each growing in size and scope as I get more and more involved in it. Since the name “Drag City” is a traditional favorite with a long history in my personal past, each version of the track has this moniker, and is differentiated only by version: Mark I, Mark II, Mark III and Mark IV (so far!).

DRAG CITY Mk.I

This was the re-construction of my original childhood Tyco “Turbo Boost 300” set that I put together on a momentary whim in early January 2020. This was the set that started what became my sustaining recreational activity of the year.

DRAG CITY Mk II:

After the Turbo Boost 300 set up, I started buying some cheap used Tyco track on ebay, much of which was damaged and useless, but I got enough out of it to build a large set on the floor of the main room of my basement. This was quickly replaced by another set, a Life Like set which was satisfactory but small. I decided to stop messing with junk and spend the money to buy a good set, and I opted for the newer Tyco “Ferrari Faceoff” because I liked the gray track. To this date this is only set I’ve found in gray, and it’s a particularly cool design since it is “shaded” with a dark streak throughout the center which simulates the look of oil on concrete. Its a shame Tomy doesn’t make the AFX track in gray, because I think it is more realistic looking and sets off the darker colored cars very nicely.

However, the set wasn’t big enough to satisfy me, so I wound up adding a significant amount of extra black track to it, giving it a “half concrete, half asphalt” look that I liked, again because I think it adds an element of realism to the layout.

This was the track that became my diorama, and as of this writing it is still up and I am still racing on it. Sadly, it is set to be deconstructed soon as I migrate out to the main room of the basement to the new, bigger track I’ve built on my custom made 6’ x 10’ table. It will be tough to say goodbye to it, but all the figures and other diorama elements will be reused, and anyway, building the thing is where all the fun really is, so I’ll get to do it all again!

DRAG CITY Mk III:

The 3^rd iteration of the track began construction in June of 2020 after I worked with a friend to build to pair of large 5 feet by 6 feet tables out of plywood and 2×4’s; these butt together at the short sides, making a 6 feet by 10 feet surface. This was where I decided to migrate from Tyco to Tomy AFX, buying my first set from a seller on ebay that same month.

My initial layout was inspired in part by the classic AFX “Big Block Battlers” set; I like the internal curves of this layout since it had a large number of right turns, which keeps things interesting. I expanded the layout significantly, adding longer straightaways with a banked turn at the end of each. After only a couple of months, however, I began to realize that this layout wasn’t satisfying me (even though to this day I can’t really say why), and I found myself repeatedly returning to my smaller Tyco track. This was exacerbated by the main room in my basement being windowless and thus very dark, while the smaller room I use for my toy collection where the original track was has 3 small windows to let in sunlight. The can lights on the ceiling in the main room were not enough, even with expensive “sunlight” LED bulbs in them; on order to enjoy the big track in the main room, I not only needed a new track layout, but also better lighting.

DRAG CITY Mk IV:

Subsequent to July of 2020, I slowed down in my pursuit of the hobby in part due to frustration over finding an acceptable timing solution, a situation exacerbated by a bizarre dispute with a company in Virginia called Viasue, a company I discourage anyone from doing business with (I may go into detail about their remarkably unprofessional conduct in a later post). During the late summer and fall I was primarily looking into doing something about the lighting in my basement. Discouraged by the price tag of any really good solutions, I eventually wound up going with the cheapest and cheesiest solution possible: I ran around to every secondhand junk store in my area looking for cheap floor lamps. I bought six of them, ranging in price from $5 to $15 each; when placed at strategically selected locations and fitted with decent shades and good quality bulbs, they provided the exact type of lighting I was looking for, at a fraction of the price of the elaborate ceiling mounting systems I had been shopping.

Throughout all this, I was happy enough on my original smaller Tyco track that I kept racing on it, continuing to buy and build cars while doing so. It wasn’t until the Christmas holiday when, stuck at home alone away from my out-of-state family due to the travel difficulties caused by the pandemic, that I decided to really start using the tables I had built for the purpose. This was when I disassembled the Tomy AFX track and rebuilt it completely to a design of my own, making it significantly larger and more interesting while maintaining the all-important runway-style straightaway I wanted so the cars really wind out and achieve something near their maximum speeds.

As of this writing I am racing on this layout and am just starting the construction of the new diorama around it, which will eventually require the deconstruction of the smaller Tyco track as the scenery around it migrates out of the new larger layout.

One of the things I need to work on now is signage! I’ve been brushing up with YouTube videos on how to make decals and labels and hope to start doing some of this soon…after I spent a grand or so on a good 4-color printer (all it takes is money, right?)

As of this writing we can only wonder what Drag City Mk. V will look like! When it arrives, I’m sure I’ll detail it here!

As of this writing I have roughly 100 Thunderjets, a collection that grows by the week. That’s a year’s worth of acquisition, so I’ll have to slow it down at some point or I’ll wind up with as many T-jets as I have Hot Wheels and Matchboxes…meaning I would need a bigger house. I’m also making little improvements where possible: performance tuning, wheel changes, decals, paint and patina.

I do have one hard and fast rule: there are two fleets, the unnumbered fleet consisting of ’40’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s hot rods, kustoms, kruisers and muscle cars; and the numbered fleet, consisting primarily of sports and racing cars, mainly 1960’s models. These fleets race independently of one another, and when I run a heat or a tournament, the cars in each respective fleet race only against others in the same fleet.

Granted, the line is a little fuzzy at times; the Trans-Am cars in the racing fleet could be considered muscle cars, while the Willys stockers in the Muscle fleet could be considered racers; and there are ‘60’s Mustangs in both fleets. But still, with only a couple of exceptions, if it has a racing number, its in the racing fleet, and if it doesn’t have a number it’s in the muscle car case.

As of now I’m working toward my goal of having 64 cars in each fleet. I’ve chosen that number because it divides evenly by halves all the way down to 2, and also because I figure that’s about as many cars as I could race in one day. It also gives me an excuse to keep buying and building more!

In these “Meet The Fleet” posts, I’ll profile some of my cars for your reading pleasure. I was going to try to figure some order in which to do this. In the end I’ve decided to do it totally at random! For some semblance of order, I will alternate between the muscle cars and the sports cars.

Questions & comments welcome!

I have realized that, as with those who build, restore, and love real classic cars, there are some deep passions and strong opinions among some who collect and race slot cars. As a classic car lover and an antiquarian, I completely understand those who are sticklers for the “originals” when it comes to toys as well. However, I myself am new enough to this hobby that I’m not a slot-car traditionalist. As a result, I have standardized my fleet of slot cars on the fast, affordable, and readily available Auto World reproductions of the original Aurora Thunderjet chassis design.

Once I started reaching out to other people who were interested in this hobby I quickly found that there are some pretty strong positions out there about the traction magnet: “Its cheating!” “It makes everything too easy!” “You can’t drift with magnet cars!”

Well, I appreciate all those positions; drifting is fun, and its true that the traction magnet takes some of the realism out of scale racing. That’s why I keep a handful of original and clean running Aurora cars from the 1960’s with their fingernail-thin tires that I enjoy sliding around the track from time to time.

But considering the fun for the money, I have decided that, for what I want to do, these super fast and relatively cheap modern updates on the original design just can’t be beat. And while I’m not the type of person who always likes the idea of, say, putting a Chevy engine in an old Ferrari, you have to admit that, if someone did that, they would have a reliable and fun old Ferrari that would probably be faster than the original.

Roll your eyes if you must, but the Auto World “Ultra G” magnetized T-jet chassis is my way of playing.

There are a few track brands for HO/1:64 slotties as well, and here again, I tried a few.

As I stated earlier, as a kid all my stuff was Tyco: my first racing set was a Tyco Pro around 1976. I can still remember leaving our apartment with my mom and dad and foolishly forgetting to unplug the power pack, only to return hours later to a room filled with smoke and a hole burned in the carpet!

In 1979 or 1980 I got one of those short-lived Matchbox sets, a really cool one where the cars could make sudden U-Turns with a nifty polarity reversal switch built into the controller, but those sets are more historical oddities now than anything. My last racing set, the Turbo Boost 300 that I got when I was 11 or 12 years old, was also a Tyco, a “Quik-Click” design much improved over the original Pro style. I still have this set today.

Since I started with Tyco sets and since there’s clear compatibility between the cars and tracks, it seemed logical-and cost effective-to continue that way, so once I started to outgrow my original Turbo Boost 300 set, I started buying bits of used Tyco track on ebay. I started slow at first, not wanting to bust the budget until I was sure this was what I wanted.

And in order to be sure, I bought a Life-Like set. It seemed OK, but I didn’t see much advantage over the Tyco brand, and I was non-plussed by the way the controllers were hard-soldered into the terminal track rather than attached with connectors. For a while, then, I had 2 tracks set up in my house, the Tyco Turbo Boost 300 on a table and the Life Like on the basement floor.

I bought several Tyco sets over the coming year, and am still racing on my favorite one. More details on that to come in a discussion on the merits of the Turbo Boost 300 speed control terminal.

By the summer, I would graduate to the Tomy AFX track. This is a story for later, as I am still working on this grand scale implementation. What I will say is that, in spite of using Tyco tracks almost exclusively for most of my life, I’m now sold on the superiority of the Tomy AFX design, but there’s still nothing wrong with a well maintained Tyco Quik-Click track if that is your preference.

There are a few different brands and types of slot cars in this HO/1:64 size range and I suppose everyone has their reasons for liking one more than the other. During this earlier period, I tried out a few of them…

As a kid, all my slot stuff was Tyco: my first racing set that I got at age 5 was a Tyco Pro set with a pair of lighted Porsche racers. I did have one AFX “Magna Traction” back in those days which was actually one of my favorite cars, a blue and white Datsun 510 sedan that I raced until it melted down. But here in the 21^st century, I realized with a quick scan of ebay that the same small selection of bodies available for Tyco chassis when I was a kid was still about all that was availble! They’ve added a small number a new styles, and now that Mattel has bought the brand (along with every other toy company, it seems) they’ve spruced up the old castings to add some new life to them, but it’s pretty much the same Porsches, Corvettes, and hot rods that I remember seeing 40 years ago. There are a lot of people who feel the Tyco “inline” motor design was superior to the Aurora/AFX “Pancake” design, and that’s probably true, but whether its toys or the real thing, I’m more about how a car looks and feels than its performance numbers, so there were other things to consider.

The Magna-Traction format then seemed like the go-to choice; they are much closer to the 1/64 scale of my Matchbox and Hot Wheels collection than the smaller Thunderjets, and with Auto World having made a whole new line of them, the chassis are easy to get and reasonably priced.

But here again, I began to realize that I was unhappy with most of the Magna-Traction/X-Traction bodies; there’s a better variety than with Tyco-or at least the variety is more interesting to me-but most of the cars don’t look right, with their fixed wheelbases giving them somewhat cartoonish proportions. I know that the fixed wheelbase is innate to all slot cars and none is ever going to look perfect as a representation of the real car it is modeled on, but with only a few exceptions, the X-Traction line underwhelmed me.

That first trip to the local hobby stores in January of 2020 resulted in my buying two very different cars: an Auto World Thunderjet “Ultra-G” (a red ’69 Chevy Nova) and a Tomy AFX “Mega G+” (a blue Cobra Daytona coupe). There was no question which I liked better: one was blinding fast-so fast that it would take real skill and practice just to keep it on the track-while the other, much slower, had a more primitive, vintage feel to it that appealed to my love of old cars. When you consider that I’m still cruising around in my 1:1 scale toy car, a 1956 Chevy Two-Ten which still has its original DC charging system and drum brakes, this is hardly surprising.

But the choice to go with T-jets was influenced by a lot more than just that “vintage feel.” Just looking at the huge variety of body styles available for these old-school screw post-style cars was amazing enough, but another thing that drew me to T-Jets was the sheer number of people into them and the copious volume of information about them that was available online, including one of the main influencers of this decision: the discovery of Road Race Replicas, and the all the awesome accessories they make for this platform, including the construction of entire cars featuring bodies with absolutely beautiful detail.

All things considered, when I looked at all the accessories and customization methods, and figuring in the cost of the chassis and the overall “bang for the buck,” my path was chosen without even thinking about it.