[BAracer]

I thought I would create a thread for those of us interested in off-road tracks of the Paris/Dakar type. 

I have been smitten by this genre of the hobby and have been slowly building up my collection of SCX/Scalextric track pieces that seem to date from around the mid-noughties. Not wishing to miss an opportunity on a recent holiday in Spain, I picked up this beauty from a hobby shop i had read about...
   
   

...which, when added to this recent auction find...
   

...means that my original collection of track pieces can expand to something more challenging than this practice layout...
   

There is a loose plan to set up a demo track at a Worthing club event at some point in the future. Hopefully we can encourage a continued interest in this branch of slot racing here in the UK.

[BAracer]

And with the FDD5 raid event taking place in France next week, here is a link to the thread for FDD4 that I attended last year, with pictures of all those tracks: -

FDD4 tracks

[BAracer]

So the FFD5 event, organised by François Favre and the Folm Dakar Dantan team, was run over the weekend of 27/28th September. I was unable to make it this year, but here are some pictures of the tracks taken by Francisco Romero, who builds very fast custom raid vehicles under his FRmodelauto brand. Here he is receiving his winners trophy from Francois and Martine...
   

And here are the all important tracks, some familiar from FDD4, but many new ones...
   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

Must try to get to FDD6 in Toulouse.

[BAracer]

A couple more recent acquisitions. You have to grab these when you can, as they rarely come up...
   
   

[BAracer]

Time for some relaxation from the rigours of tarmac circuit racing!
   
   
   

[BAracer]

Having incorporated everything i could into the above layout, after an evening spent running a few different vehicles round it, I learnt that...

1. You need at least one full straight as a run up to an extended dune if you don't want to wear out tyres trying to scramble for grip to reach the summit.

2. The suspension bridge needs a bit more fettling to get it both to sit robustly in place as it is traversed, and to improve its track conductivity.

3. Don't put obstacles immediately after a curve as a vehicle that's not running parallel with the slot is not going to run straight and will come off if its carrying any speed.

Based on the lessons learnt, I revised the layout to flow a bit better and give me the chance to drive round it more confidently. Here is the updated layout...

   

   

   

I'm using the black pieces of Classic track as power feed points around the layout. Is anyone aware of SCX power taps to work with their off-road track?

[BAracer]

Well, this stuff hasn't been made for 20 years or so, so I had to grab this bundle when I spotted it...

Banana included to give some scale to the packages...
   

...which contained these gems
   

All in preparation for this event next year
   

[Graham]

That looks good to me.

[BAracer]

I think the plan is to have four tracks set up, two SCX and two Ninco.

Just racing for the fun of it that night.

[roguejackal]

I've always steered clear of the SCX track as I was led to beleive the depth of the slotbis quite shallow the same as UK Scalextric classic track is that correct?