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.

Just so everyone is clear: I do not consider myself to be a “serious” scale modeler; I’m not cut from the same bolt of cloth as model railroaders, who strive for accuracy and realism in their dioramas and layouts. Much of what I am doing will seem cheesy and even childish to you if you are all about making sure every piece of foliage and ground cover is accurate and every building is properly weathered. Childish may be dead-on: I’m not making museum pieces, I want to have fun: I’m just a big kid playing with his toys. As a results, my primary goal in creating the diorama surrounding my slot tracks is to show off some of my prodigious 1/64 diecast collection. Please keep this in mind before commenting that “the trees are wrong” or “the angle of that bridge isn’t realistic.”

Having said this, as things progress you can see I have made an effort to blend the HO scale and 1/64 scale to best of my ability, including the use of “forced perspective” where possible. I think I’ve done a decent job but I am always open to suggestions.

As you can see from the images and vids above, I am primarily a collector of Lesney-era Matchboxes. I do have many others, including Hot Wheels (naturally), Tomica, Johnny Lightning, and of course POST-Lesney Matchboxes, but the British-made Matchboxes of the 60’s and early 70’s are my main field of interest, and it is a topic on which I am quite knowledgeable.

Always up for interaction with others interested in this hobby.