January 20 2011
The Dirty Dozen: Rally Car Showdown
Rally racing is a difficult sport to follow in North America. It doesn’t receive nearly the television air time that it deserves which tends to keep it out of the public eye. Still, I’ve managed to end up with a few rally cars in my collection. Thanks to the popularity of this sport in Europe home base to most slot car manufacturers’ head offices slot car racers have quite a few interesting subjects to draw upon. Recently, the club at Mini Grid in Toronto started a bi-monthly series for rally cars so I needed to find the most effective tool for racing there. To do this I’ve reached into my collection a pulled out a cross section of 12 rally cars. I then glued and trued the same formulation of urethane tire to each car, removed the traction magnets, glued in the motors and rear bushings, and then set my best Q time on Mini Grid’s Sport track as well as the wood track at Race Haven Hobbies in Brampton. The lap times were averaged between the two tracks and the results and my observations are presented here.
