Hello all,
           My name is Bruce. I am 43 from Ohio. Just started getting into slot car racing about a month ago. A buddy of mine built a descent sized digital Carrera track in his basement, a 1/24 and 1/32 track, we bought a couple cars and off to racing we went. It has been a blast so far. We are really enjoying it. I have a Ford Capri Zakspeed in the 1/24 scale and a BMW in the 1/32 scale. Also just purchased a Fort GT race car in the 1/32 and a Ford Mustang in the 1/32 but haven't had the chance to race with these two as of yet. Had to buy the Mustang to compete with my buddy's Firebird.

 I am actually hoping this community can help get me started in painting and building my own cars. Especially the 1/24 scale. There are a lot of 1/32 scale cars I like on Carrera's site so I will probably end up with about 7 or so cars. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of the 1/24 scale cars that I really like so I am really interested in finding bodies and doing my own paint schemes to them. I am just not sure where to start as far as the chassis goes. I don't think I'm ready for the build my own chassis route. I'm wondering if there are ready to go chassis and all I need to do is slap my painted bodies on them? What bodies go with what chassis? These are the kind of things I really am excited to learn about.

Anyway hope everyone is staying safe and look forward to learning from you all and sharing some of my paint schemes and builds if I ever get that far.

   

Live coverage from this weekend's re-scheduled Pikes Peak International Hill Climb will be broadcast free on the US Mobil1 Facebook page this Sunday, 30 August. Starting at 7am US Mountain Daylight Time and running though to 1pm, the coverage will include live action, highlights, guest interviews and much more. For people viewing outside of North America, do make sure you are not redirected to your local Mobil1 Facebook page, it's only the US page (www.facebook.com/Mobil1/) that has the broadcast. This might mean you logging out of your Facebook account. For the UK, the timings work out at 2pm to 8pm on Sunday - continental Europe 3 to 9pm.

This year's event is the 98th running of the legendary hill climb, but the first held without spectators. It's a very good excuse to share one of the best short motorsport films of all time, Jean Louis Mourey's Climb Dance - produced for Peugeot in 1989 and starring Ari Vatanen and his Peugeot 405 Turbo 16...



It is a most wonderful five minutes.

The course is now fully-paved - a process that began in 2006 and was completed in time for the 2012 event. Despite the warnings of many Pikes Peak veterans, paving the road has not caused the event to decline. If anything, the hill climb has boomed in terms of numbers and the calibre of entries over the past decade. Not surprisingly, times have tumbled - Romain Dumas was the first to crack 8 minutes for the 12.42 miles, setting the current course record of 7 minutes 57.148 seconds in 2018 with the electric Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak prototype...

   

There is plenty more information about the history of the event and this year's race on the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb website: ppihc.org/fans/

Most of you know me as one of the DiSCA guys, you know, large international digital events, a down and out scratch builder, racing with fully bespoke cars, every little detail modified to the hilt. So it may come as a surprise that I am now sharing with you...info on an "new" initiative of mine... an analoge, local, endurance series...with hand out cars.  

Well there's a very simple reason for this initiative...and that's Covid 19,...how it has had its effects on our hobby and the mini cosmos I have practiced my hobby in for the past decade.

Back to Basics
So there I was late March, "the event of the year" (at least for me) cancelled, clubs going into lockdown one by one. Left all projects on the workbench as, hey no race to build stuff for in the foreseeable future, so motivation died faster than you could spell Corona.
I did keep in touch with my (inter)national friends, most of them key members at their local clubs. Besides their personal conditions, the dwindling health condition of their clubs usually a serious concern, everybody hoping for better times, yours trulyincluded

Nothing to build, race or otherwise keep my hands occupied...my brain kept spinning...contemplating ideas on how to restart the competition events I was missing, but with international travel restrictions still in place..more locally based.
One of the things I always do while evaluating ideas for a new event, is to take stock of how many cars/ racers there are available in the region I would consider the potential participants would come from. At the time I was still looking at the universe from my little niche planet, so DiSCA GT3 looked like the most likely candidate...only to discover that locally (in the Benelux area) there were but half a dozen.
Not enough to form a healthy grid, and although GT3 are the cars with the lowest threshold. (based on relatively stock cars) the gap between those with experience and those who would maybe be interested in joining..was too big.
So time for a re think...time to leave my niche heaven and start over...by going back to basics.


RevoSlot range, from an ugly duckling to a flock of Swans

3 years ago when RevoSlot entered the 1/32 Slotcar market with their Porsche GT2, I have to admit that I wasn't that impressed with their first creation.
It looked like repop, reworked version of the old Fly/Proslot GT2 but with a heavier body, metal chassis and 3mm (1/24) technology.  
It felt like an odd combination, specially when compared to the cars I was running in DiSCA.  
I considered it to be sort of an ugly duckling, but at least one with nice bling bling wheels.
Fast forward to spring/summer 2020, as the first clubs in Holland come out of lock down, I had my first run with a RevoSlot on the wooden track @ SlotShop Zwanenburg. 
By steadily releasing a new car every 6 months, RevoSlot had expanded their range with some of the most iconic GT/LMP's  from 1995 -2000...I was impressed.
I was even more impressed when (to my pleasant surprise) they all ran pretty good straight out of the box, and I mean literally...straight out of the box.
Spend most of the evening opening box by box running some of my favorite cars from the late 90's... (courtesy of the Benelux distributer Tom Peters/Slotshop)



The proof of the pudding
It won't come as a surprise to read that I went home (late) that night with a brand new F333sp, a Viper white Kit and several RevoSlot cars on loan from Tom's personal collection. Cause a clear "what if" idea had started to form in my mind, one that required some "eating".
So this summer I toured the country, visiting different clubs, running the RevoSlot cars on their tracks. What I wanted to "proof" was how many or better how few set-up changes would be required to run the RevoSlot cars properly on the very different track types and surfaces. 
Some of the clubs I visited were running a Revoslot class in their local club competition, some of them had near Box stock rules, some had "improved" rules which allowed all the little set-up tricks & tweaks common in their "other" club classes.
All the clubs (except my own) run purely analoge, meaning I had not visited them in years. So come race night, I was the new "slow" guy, needing to (re) learn all the lanes on the track...
...and learn how to handle/race their "prepped" cars in a short period of time. For what I had in mind..I turned out to be the ideal "guinea pig".



To have my cake ...and eat it
During my club visits I also ran the Revo cars I got from the distributer, I kept them unchanged to have a base line reference. So the first thing I noticed was, that no matter what track surface I ran them on, Carrera, Ninco, textured routed with braids or smooth copper taped wood... they all ran well with the same basic set-up. 

Running on all four wheels, the sprung guide took care of any difference in track rails/braid height. The relatively low C.G  provided a very docile and and steady handling through the corners. Stock motor and gearing provided more than enough torque and brakes to accelerate and decelerate the +20% heavier cars (compared to regular 1/32nd slotcars). Sure enough the run in cars ran (a bit) better that those straight out of the box, rounder tyres and better seated /aligned ball bearings did make a difference.

And sure enough, the cars fine tuned by the individual club members ran much "better", wel... at least when they ran them. I noticed that the more fine tuned a car was for a specific track/surface, the longer I needed to get to grips with it. 
During my tour I also noticed some Day-glo colored white kits, turned down underscaled front and rear wheels...and A-finals with 5 identical cars. As those who know me..know....not my cup of tea.
After finishing my tour I made an appointment with the Benelux distributer of Revoslot...for the plan I had in mind... I intended "to have my cake and eat it."

The RevoSlot "Back to the 90's" Endurance Series
To cut a long story short, as a result of my initiative, for the 2020-2021 season, RevoSlot Benelux will organise the RevoSlot “Back to the 90’s” Endurance series in collaboration with various slot racing clubs in the Netherlands and Belgium.
These will be one day events on which a “short” Team Endurance race is held with a unique format:
For each round, Teams will race various RevoSlot Sportscars from the RevoSlot range. Each prepared Box Stock by RevoSlot and fine-tuned by the host club. (Braids, ballast, shimms, tyres)
During the Endurance, the cars are fixed per lane, only the teams change lanes, so they will race a different Sportscar from the RevoSlot range on each lane.


Well ok, maybe not that unique, to be honest I've just taken the "Old club race with club cars" principle and made it bit bigger so it would work for a series of events.
At the moment the I'm still working on some of the details of this format, but the intention is to introduce elements during the races that we know from the “big” Endurance race such as the Le Mans 24hrs… but on a 1/32 scale.
You can think of pit stops, driver and tire changes and darkened periods for which the RevoSlot's will be fitted and run with (Z-machine) lights.
Cause for me there should be more to an event that just running cars in a slot 


What's in it for me?
For me, well obviously via this initiative I get "to have my cake and eat it". Kickstarting my style of competition in a more local format, with a grid of more than a dozen well detailed, original liveried "blueprinted" slot cars, with lights and tyre decals. As a side effect I hope to boost the numbers of slotracers interested in Endurance events..with a possible overflow to Digital Endurance events.
For the distributer a wonderful unique opportunity to promote the entire RevoSlot range in a low-threshold way under competition conditions.
For the participating clubs co- hosting the events, a chance to boost their club finances by feeding a lot of hungry, thirsty slotracers...and...
... a great opportunity to draw in some new potential members.
For the participating teams & slotracers, a great opportunity to compete on different tracks with different cars in an extremely level playing field.

For you the reader, well you are the reason I'm sharing this information. If you've read the whole post so far, I'm sure you've found some of it interesting, maybe it made you think...what if? 
In that case feel free to use copy/duplicate all of the above. Because if I can make this work here in The Netherlands ...so could you in your local region.

There's a lot more I could share on the reasoning behind and the work that has been done setting up and promoting this series. 
Like setting up the facebook page "RevoSlot Endurance Series" ( its in Dutch but FB do a pretty good job auto translating), the sign in forms, the homologation sheets that are used to blue print the cars, etc. etc.
To make this work there's more to it than just designing a pretty logo and calling up some friends. But if you're really interested, post here or write me a pm.

Back to the beginning...Covid 19
Last but not least, I started this post by mentioning that the current Covid 19 situation was one of the reasons why I started this Series.
The chosen format with hand out cars has the advantage of being very easy to run the events while respecting Covid 19 restrictions. 
No need for a paddock with individual/team workplaces, compact events that require no additional practice sessions other than on the day itself.
Within this format the Tracks and clubs selected for the Series have plenty of room to respect social distancing.
They need to as (at least in The Netherlands) they are accountable for respecting Covid 19 restrictions and guidelines and can be fined if they don't.
I'm convinced that within this format we can enjoy our hobby once again, in a fun, challenging and most of all safe and healthy way.

With kind regards 
on behalf of the RevoSlot "Back to the 90's" Endurance Series
Tamar

We'd like to thank our sponsors. Liquid Wrench, Red Devil, Boss Bodies, and Krud Kutter have provided the prizes for our racing program this segment. Due to COVID-19, occupancy is limited and new racers must call first to be approved. Call 603-826-4242 for details. Racing is free, as are the hot dogs. Here are Sunday's winners. Next race is Sept. 6.

I have an old Ford 3 window saloon and though I maybe able to modify it to a pickup or panel van ,as I already have a pickup and saw a Dukes of Hazzard van on eBay for an eye watering price ,a van it's going to be .
Cut the back off and really just a matter of sticking a few bits back on 
Keep you posted 
Steve

Hello,

I am new to slots, and the spring for the guide in one of my cars from the 132 Furore Carrera set, doesn't bounce back correctly on one direction. 

Does anyone know where I can find a spring replacement? I have googled everything I can think of... I can find every other part but the spring.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you 
Ryan

   

Team Slot 12707 Ford Escort RS2000 Mk2 'Teboil Gold' - Juha Kankkunen, 1000 Lakes Rally 1979. Available now. RRP £54.95

       

Newly arrived from Spain is this lovely Team Slot model of the RS2000 that four-time world champion Juha Kankkunen drove at his debut WRC rally - the 1979 One Thousand Lakes Rally in his native Finland. Kankkunen and co-driver Timo Hantunen finish in 14th place, 26 minutes behind the winning car, the Fiat Abarth of Markku Alén and Ilkaa Kivimäki.

UK Team Slot distributor, Staffs Slot Cars have sent us some fabulous pictures of the detailing on the car to drool over...

       

       

   

I wonder how many Juha Kankkunen slot cars have been produced over the years? I suspect some of our rally fans will know...

The Escort is available now in the UK from Team Slot retailers, including MRE and Pendle Slot Racing. Expect to pay £5-£10 less than the RRP.

Thanks to Steve at Staffs Slot Cars UK for giving us permission to share the photos here.

last Friday, a bunch of nascot wooders headed up to milton keynes for an evening.
Nascot wood is still closed because the school hall is not available to us because of the pandemic.
A really good night out. 
Slot cars and a bar! 
Several tracks.mainly wood, including a legacy  BSCRA national track.
£13 per hour per person. We stayed for 2 hours.

Is this the only commercial raceway the uk? 

Racewarsuk.co.uk

This is a First view of the test shots for the upcoming Slot.it Nissan GTR GT3.


The NISSAN GT-R NISMO GT3 1:1 s Nismo's  (Nissans racing Department) new race car developed in line with FIA GT3 regulations.

The car has a VR38DETT V6 Twin Turbocharged motor  which unleashes a maximum 405 kw ( 550 ps ) of horsepower and maximum torque of 637Nm .
The car was originally released in 2012, with the lastest version available to the public being the 2018 update.  A pricey car at $550k.


While Slot.it HAVE NOT yet released what versions they will be releasing, the car has some lovely liveries available - of which two are seen below:



                                                                                    


Slot.it's first test shots of the car.


                                                                                    

 
Pretty good likeness of the 1:1 cars above!!



Slot.it have also released this VIDEO of the car on its first test run.

Just thought I'd share a track design that I did for a friend. You might well know him, Graham Lane. The idea was all his, I just interpreted it and drew it up. It's a three lane routed track, where the outer part is a standard analogue layout with 9cm lane spacing, but the infield narrows down so that it's basically a two lane track with an inner lane that wanders between the two in a racing line.

I thought it was an interesting idea, part of which was to introduce some of the strategy involved with overtaking in digital racing. Might be an interesting hybrid, or it could just confuse every body. What do you think?