[Scuderia_Turini]

My bundle form Jadlam arrived today and i did a quick check with the powerbase sitting on top of the kettle in the kitchen and all worked fine with the car driven wheels off the track. Cue much bad language when I let the wheels touch the track and the car dived off the end of the powerbase. Ah well, later I can superglue the rear wing back on the ultra-rare Fly Lancia Rally.  

My permanent layout is Ninco track so I had already formed a plan to connect the Scalextric power base in via the controller socket. I did that and ... I had control. Following Andy's above recommendation to set the config to left handed and setting the max-speed to about 50% I set off using a car that was handy - Team Slot Lancia Delta S4. I managed a couple of slow laps without de-slotting but realised that the quirky handling and powerful motor of the Delta was not a wise choice for this new venture. Scalextric Ford RS200 are quite forgiving and sure enough I was soon only de-slotting occasionally.  The de-slotting was of course down to my unfamiliarity with the controls. After several more laps including some good ones I fired up the Race Coordinator computer for timing. 16 seconds is a fair lap target that I challenge visitors with so I hoped to match that. With a decent car I can get down to 13 seconds and about 11 if magnet assisted. After several laps I managed a 19.3 with the RS200 and called it a day. 

I found that I was coasting in to the bends due to the lack of dynamic braking and the slowness of moving my thumb on the slider meant that I couldn't manage to pulse the power in the bends. I was using a Lenovo 110mm (diagonal) screen.
I began to get a feel for the speed control but ignored the brake button for now. I started to feel that it was almost calming to drive using this tech and that racing against someone using the same could work quite well. 
In this era of portable devices being an everyday thing, its nice to think that the Spark-Plug could actually initiate a revival of slot-car racing. 

The only real snag I identified was that it is essential to hold the device with two hands and I couldn't find a comfortable way of doing that - as we tend do with a traditional hand controller.
A minor snag is that when I was retrieving my car I had to reach over the track and in doing that my device had inverted the screen so I had to "shoogle" it get the correct orientation. I turned off "Auto-Rotate" but that didn't help - I guess that device feature really only covers landscape to portrait stuff.

Am thinking that having a stand for the device might improve the ability to control the slider. That may help us old codgers adapt to this technology. Not sure that a larger device would help, the slider movement would be increased.

Will work on my left-thumb braking technique, that is probably the path to quicker laps. 

Leo