[CMOTD]

a reminder that club racers represent a tiny proportion of the potential Scalextric marketplace - although we do like to think we’re really important.

I take my hat off to those tuning a Scalextric car to run on wood track.  A car designed for collectors’ display cases and magnet racing on Scalextric home tracks will need a lot of work.

I accept that most of their sales come from magnet racers, collectors and TV/Film related stuff but why neglect any sector of the market when it is so easy to cater for different tastes? It costs no more to design and produce half decent chassis and tyres than rubbish ones. Club racers are indeed a small minority but there are an awful lot of people out there who race at home sans magnet, whether on wood or plastic, who would happily buy more of their product if they improved it a bit.

Plenty of Scalextric cars are perfectly happy on wooden club tracks though, so they can do it when they want to. Over the years the club I used to run have had many classes for box standard Scalextric cars - Japanese GT, American muscle, NASCAR, standard GT and BTCC etc with just a change of tyres allowed. All of them produced good close racing and, looking at previous lap records, they were no slouches either. They have been running impact resistant Ferrari F430s as a club/handout class for many years and they are little rocket ships. I have a couple at home which can give a Slot.It car a run for its money.

Jim has shown with his videos that Sierras and M3s can run at club level without modification although I can't quite see how they managed that. I would be grateful if he could give us exact details of their preparation and full specs of the track they run on.

Returning to the subject in hand I gave my Ratzenberger M3 another run this morning and something apparently clicked in the motor which suddenly acquired full power. It now exhibits the same wheel hopping characteristics  as the Soper version so I have two demented pogo sticks to contend with instead of one. Either I have a pair of rogue cars or I am missing a trick somewhere.