The story of the first-ever (of many, we hope) Daytona West / Old Weird Herald / Fantasy World Proxy Race is really the stories of the cars and the people who built them more than who did what on which lap. The real value of mail-in racing is to bring together cars from all over the world, cars that would never be together on the same race track in any other kind of event. At best, the people who run a mail-in race can only provide a level playing field and a group of drivers who will be consistent and try to bring the cars through in one piece. They are not going to get the last ounce of performance from the cars the way the cars' owner / builders would. The qualifying times and lap totals are never really indicative of the cars' true capabilities.

So, we've concentrated on trying to convey to our readers something of the character and background of the cars and their builders while giving you as much technical information as we can to inspire and help you in your own building efforts. We've tried to highlight features you can use to make your own cars stronger, faster, more competitive, and better looking. We've also tried to point out the ways in which the various cars may be especially suited to different kinds of home and club racing situations and needs. If we can help our readers find or adapt a car design that will work well in the particular kinds of racing they want to do, we will consider this article and the proxy race a success.

Here they are, then - the cars of the first ever Daytona West / Old Weird Herald / Fantasy World Proxy Race.
 

I knew these cars were going to be controversial the minute I opened the box. Having known Russell for many years I knew that whatever he sent would be first-class equipment. That the cars dominated their respective classes without so much as having turned a wheel before being mailed off speaks volumes about just how first-class Russell's approach to slot car racing is.

He had emailed me shortly after the rules were announced asking if spring steel chassis were allowed. I told him yes, as long as the cars complied with all the rules. Still, I wasn't quite expecting what amounted to a couple of USRA / IMCA eurosport chassis built to the proxy race rules.

Even Russell, an airline executive and former South African national slot racing champion, agrees that these two cars are well outside the typical home/club racer orbit. Russell designed them on a CAD program and sent the disk to a laser cutting operation in South Africa. The precision-cut parts came back to him for assembly and the fitting of the beautifully painted and detailed bodies.

The use of spring steel allowed Russell to take a unique approach to the car's basic concept. His cars, as they arrived, were among the lightest ones entered. This gave them outstanding acceleration and the capability of having weight added in where it would do the most good.. The light weight was not without its downside, however. The cars were so light it was hard to find a controller that suited them. Their cornering ability was the highest by far of the entries, but both cars were hard to drive with confidence at the limit until we leaded them down considerably. Even so, their racing weights were still among the lightest in their classes. The extra weight added far more in forgiving driving qualities than it took away in acceleration. The resulting combination was clearly ahead of anything else in the field. Of the 7 other official CanAm / SP entries, only one came within 1/2 second of Russell's qualifying time. In NASCAR, the second-fastest qualifier was over 6/10 second adrift.

There was some disagreement on how much to lead down the Mirage. I wanted to use more lead than Kris Kassens, who worked on the car, eventually used. Kris will disagree with me, but I think a little more lead would have yielded another couple of tenths.

The chassis were not the only outstanding features of the cars.

The Monte Carlo used the only Revell - Monogram body entered, considerably lighter than the Toybiz bodies that filled most of the field. It was the optimum match for the lightweight chassis, providing the lowest possible center of gravity. He made the body even lighter by using a very thin vac-formed window piece, much lighter than the kit original. The Mirage body was the widest known legal body for the CanAm / SP class, and Russell's chassis made effective use of all the available width, providing maximum pan area. Oddly, enough, the Mirage was a last-minute substitute for a narrower, and probably heavier, John Bacon fiberglass Ferrari 312P body. Russell was forced to make the switch when the Ferrari body's paint job went bad and he didn't have enough time to strip and repaint it. Russell mounted the bodies with pins and provided an extra measure of body movement by drilling the mounting holes slightly oversize.

Russell used 64 pitch inline gears on the NASCAR and 80 pitch gears on the sports car, a step beyond the 48 and 64 pitch gears used on the other entries.

In addition, he had hard delrin front tires cut to the required sizes. These were noisy on the track but they proved very effective. On both cars the fronts rotated independently. With plastic wheels from a Ninco McLaren GT cut down for inserts, the Mirage's wheels looked great, too. On the Monte Carlo the chromed kit wheels, cut down, served as inserts.

The cars, despite their light weight, did not lack for scale detail. The Mirage came with mirrors, exhausts, windshield wiper, screen in the body openings, and headlight pockets with lenses under the clear covers. The Monte Carlo had a full upper roll cage and a very skillfully applied "Scooby Doo" Cartoon Network decal set over black . Both cars' paint was smooth and glossy, clearly the class of the field.

Russell agrees that some additional restrictions on car construction are in order for the next proxy race, and he is eager to get going on his entries, regardless of what the rules turn out to be. He's a true sportsman and modeler and has set a very high standard for the future. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

For his class victories Russell won two slot cars from Fantasy World and asked that they be donated to help one or two up-and-coming young racers. Fantasy World honored Russell's wish by donating them to the slot car racing program at a local junior high school where a teacher has set up a Scalextric layout and is using it both as a teaching tool and to introduce many 12 to 14 year-olds to the slot racing hobby, producing a whole new crop of up-and-coming young racers.
  

If there were two cars that could be said to be at the opposite extreme from Russell Sheldon's cars in design and construction, not to mention weight, Chris Briggs's "Lead Sled" cars would be the ones. And yet, they were nearly as fast, taking high qualifying positions in both races and finishing second in the CanAm race.

Chris has been developing the Lead Sled design for some time now and races the cars regularly in his local area. His two proxy race chassis are virtually identical except for length and width. Both consist of a single piece of 1/16" sheet brass with a cutout for the inline motor. A motor bracket is mounted to the rear of the chassis plate with brass rod reinforcement. The guide tongue is the end of a 1/16" brass strip, 1/2" wide, that extends back to the front of the motor.

The American Line #1075 front wheels rotate independently on 1/8" stub axles turning in short lengths of tubing soldered to stout L-brackets of !/16" X 1/4" brass strip. On the CanAm car the tube-to-bracket joints are reinforced with wire wrappings. The split front axles allow the guide to be moved back to fit under the relatively short noses of scale bodies without the front axle interfering with access to the guide nut. At the rear, Parma MX tires, .850" in diameter and .600" wide, turn on a 1/8" axle. A 48 pitch tooth pinion turns a 31 tooth PSE King Crown gear.

The "Lead Sled" name comes from the Slick 7 self-stick lead that covers both the entire upper and lower surfaces of the chassis. This yields an all-up weight of 6.75 ounces for the Ferrari and a whopping 7.2 ounces for the Monte Carlo. The theory, of course, is to put a lot of weight down low and get the center of gravity as low as possible. The tradeoff is in acceleration. Chris normally races his Lead Sleds with 16-D motors that deliver more power than the Cheetahs, which seemed marginal to shove all that avoirdupois around the track. Both cars were getting passed on the straights by just about every other car. That they more than made it up in the turns, in most cases, proves that the tradeoff is a good one.

On tight tracks, at least, the Lead Sled design seems to work better at shorter guide leads. The Ferrari's handling was noticeably better than that of the stock car, which turned out to be uncomfortable on the track's two tight inner lanes. On the outside lanes it did fine but on the inner lanes It did not want to turn. .Part of this, we think, was because of an error we made when we remounted the Monte Carlo's body before the race. Chris attaches his bodies with machine screws through the bottom of the chassis, as shown here.

The screws are backed off a couple of turns from full tight to allow the body to float on its mounts. Chris uses plastic model cement as a kind of Loctite to keep the screws from backing out farther. After taking the screws out and putting them back in several times enough cement had accumulated in the body mount holes to keep the body from floating properly. When we cleaned out the holes after the race the problem improved but did not go away.

The CanAm car, considerably shorter, showed none of this problem and was one of the most popular cars with the official drivers, who found it easy to drive and predictable at the limit. The car's second place finish is due in part to the confidence it inspired in the drivers. Another of Chris's cars, also quite short, was present at the event and also handled noticeably better than the stock car. It may very well be that on a track with larger radius turns the NASCAR would have come into its own and the sports car would have been at a disadvantage.

Chris painted both his cars with automotive touch-up paint from spray cans. He detailed the stock car body, a Toybiz, with assorted peel-and-stick decals and finished it off with a neatly painted Champion vac-formed stock car interior and Larry Shephard windows. The Ferrari, painted a rich shade of dark red, features fine brass screen in the body openings on the fenders and in the large scoop beside the cockpit. The body, by the way, is a genuine original Aurora from about 1970, not one of the easier old bodies to come by. That Chris would use it for a project like this marks him as a true racer-builder. Way to go, Chris!

Everyone liked the ruggedness, simplicity., and honest driving characteristics of the Lead Sleds. They also had a formidable intimidation factor on the track. Nobody wanted to deslot in front of one. The Lead Sled can be built by anyone with a moto-tool and a soldering iron. There are no complex shapes or wire bends and no delicate soldering in hard-to-get-at-places. It's the ideal chassis for the beginner or for a "spec" chassis design that all the members of a club would be able to build and drive. And, should Superman visit your track, the presence of several of these cars will protect him from any Kryptonite in the environment.
 

Eugene Harrington's NASCAR entry is, in overall design, a Lead Sled without the lead. In fact, it was so well balanced that we raced it at 4.75 ounces with no lead at all on the chassis. Its performance in both qualifying and the race demonstrated the effectiveness of the design, especially considering that the car has a rather heavy Toybiz body.

The chassis is made from a solid piece of .025" sheet brass reinforced with 1/8" square brass tubing. A length of L-section brass strip is soldered to each side of the main chassis to provide location for the body and a surface for the Velcro attachment strips. The bottom edges of the body rest on the horizontal parts of the L-strips and the Velcro holds them securely in place. The car was crashed fairly hard several times and the body never shifted on its mountings.
 

The front axle tube is a piece of square tubing with oilites installed. It is supported by uprights made from brass angle and braced rearward with lengths of square tubing. The guide tongue is a Slick 7 steel part .

At the rear, Eugene cut apart two motor brackets to make one very narrow one. This allows the use of .750" diameter rear tires with a width of over .700", easily the widest of any car in either class.
 

This is another car that can be built quite easily by anyone with a Moto-tool and a soldering iron. The Velcro body mount is the easiest-to-make form of mounting for hard bodies, and there are no complex cuts or bends anywhere in the chassis.

The car arrived with a Scalextric-type all-plastic press-on crown gear. The gear simply was not up to the weight, power, and traction of the car and, despite careful lubrication and break-in, ate itself within a few laps of hard running. We replaced it with a Cox 27 tooth crown gear, keeping the original ratio but providing a much more robust gear to handle the load. We had to grind away the inboard surface of the right-hand axle oilite to make room for the wider Cox gear. We also put a reducer in the gear to fit the 3/32" axle. After this change #21 was bulletproof throughout the competition.

Eugene did not have time to detail the body before mailing the car, but the smooth Petty Blue paint was quite striking. When the car is fully detailed it should have looks every bit as impressive as its performance and ruggedness
 

Rich sent in two neatly turned-out entries, a lengthened and narrowed Womp NASCAR and a shortened and narrowed Parma I-32 CanAm car. Both cars were models of actual cars. The Lumina, from an AMT snap kit, was Derrike Cope's 1990 Daytona 500 winner and the 917, which began as an old Cox home set car, modeled a CanAm entry driven by Hurley Haywood in 1973. Rich's choice of CanAm bodies was, perhaps, the most unusual in the field. He took a relatively narrow, toylike body from and built an effective race car under it while turning it into an attractive replica with nothing more than skillfully applied paint and decals.

The Lumina's Womp chassis was lengthened with a simple transverse cut and spliced back together at the required length with a piece of sheet brass soldered on top. The I-32 chassis had a slice cut out of both the center and the pan assembly just forward of amidships. The cut ends were simply butt-soldered together. On both chassis the L-section strips for the self-stick Velcro used to mount the body served to reinforce the splices.

Rich's Lumina has narrowed .0825" Parma tires and a Cox crown gear on a 1/8" axle at the rear, and Toybiz fronts turning on a knurled 3/32" axle inside a 1/8" o.d. axle tube. The 917 uses homemade front wheels and tires held onto a 1/16" wire axle by spring retainers. Its rear tires are .790" PSEs on a 3/32" axle with Faas 10-40 gears.

The Lumina ran without lead at 4.0 ounces and the 917, after we added some lead, raced at 4.8 ounces. In hindsight, the Lumina probably should have been leaded down to around 5 ounces with the extra weight at the front. This might well have gained the car at least one more position at the finish.

Both cars ran trouble free in the race, but both could have used a ledge below the Velcro to locate the bottom edge of the body accurately when removing and remounting the body under the press of racing conditions.
 

Every once in a while you see somebody come up with a solution to a problem that is so elegant in its simplicity that you smack yourself in the side of the head and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" Robert Cline, Jr.'s NASCAR Pontiac is like that. While everybody else was cutting and splicing production chassis or laboriously scratch building their latest design, Robert simply got a late-model Parma brass Womp chassis with the extra set of front axle holes for a longer wheelbase. He draped a Toybiz body over it with some minor grinding on the rear wheel openings and 4 body clip holes the only needed modifications, and presto! A NASCAR entry good enough for 4th place with no cutting and no soldering, except a little bit to help secure the motor firmly to its mounting bracket. He even used the stock Parma wire body mounting clips and Womp OEM wheels and tires, .825" diameter at the rear and .790" at the front.

All we had to do in the way of race tuning was to stick on just over 1 ounce of lead for an all-up weight of 5.5 ounces, and the car handled better than most of the other NASCARs and most of the CanAm cars, too. The car came through the race with nothing worse than a few paint scrapes and was a favorite of the official drivers.

This is a car anybody can build, even without a soldering iron and a Moto-tool. All you'd really need is a drill, an X-acto knife, and a couple of Allen wrenches. It's exactly the kind of car the hobby needs more of to expand participation and dispel the myth that building slot cars is only for the mechanically gifted and lavishly equipped. Parma should have a line of hardbody cars like this in their catalog.

Robert is a sales representative at a GM dealer and a longtime Pontiac fan. He owns several collectible 1/1 scale Pontiacs, among them a '66 Catalina, a '68 GTO, and two '86 Gran Prix Fastbacks, including #89 out of 1118 built. So, naturally, he wanted to enter a Pontiac in the proxy race. Here, too, his approach was simplicity itself. He painted his Toybiz Chevy body teal blue metallic and made it unmistakably a Pontiac just by painting the make's two trademark "nostrils" on the front. The word "Pontiac", boldly lettered across the hood, further reinforces the message.

He wrote on his entry form, "I don't care if you send the car back in a body bag." Well said, Robert, spoken like a true racer!
 

Larry Shephard likes to make his slot cars models of actual full-size cars and give them lots of detail. His NASCAR Spam Thunderbird, in its purple and yellow livery, and his CanAm Porsche both capture the look and character of the originals. He also has a flair for taking chassis design in new directions.

The T-bird has its motor up front in the pattern of the Fly Dodge Viper, Marcos, and Panoz, but the tin-zinc plated brass and wire space frame in which it rides takes maximum advantage of the front-motor location's weight distribution to produce a well balanced car at a relatively svelte 4.8 ounces total car weight, even with a heavy Toybiz body and 3/4 of an ounce of added lead. The chassis construction features the kind of intricate workmanship reminiscent of the 60s, with steel wire members triangulating the structure at different angles. The result is a chassis that is not only strong and capable but also interesting and pleasing to the eye.

Everything about the car's construction is neat, clean and strong. There is not a speck of superfluous weight or structure to be found, and everything is as strong as it needs to be without being over designed. The chassis photos speak for themselves.

Larry stretched the sides of the body out to accommodate a wider chassis and also subtly bent the nose down to get its bottom edge right down next to the track where it belongs, or so it appears when placed alongside an out-of-the package body. He also came up with an especially neat lead wire arrangement. The wires form almost a perfect circle, giving excellent self-centering action, and are soldered to the lead wires at a 90 degree angle, which allows the polarity to be changed by swapping lead wires at the guide without affecting the self-centering and also reduces bending of the wire at the clip, which can lead to a broken wire.
 

Larry painted the body the appropriate shade of Purple to match the car driven by Lake Speed in 1997. The numbers, Spam logos, and other yellow markings are all cut out by hand from solid self-stick film. The other decals are from various peel-and-stick sheets. The vac-formed window piece, which Larry makes not only for himself but also for sale, is detailed with strap, rivet, window net, and duct details. The interior features a roll cage and fuel cell detail. The detailing extends to the .750" diameter wheels and tires, Alphas on the front and PSEs on the rear. Larry lettered Goodyear in yellow on the sidewalls and painted the "holes" in the wheel centers for a very realistic look.

We probably didn't come close to getting everything out of the car. It felt as though it was just getting broken in properly by the end of the race. The car's handling showed flashes of brilliance. If skillfully driven it could corner quickly indeed, but we never really got to where we could be consistent with it. This is one car that almost certainly suffered from the limitations of the proxy race format more than most. With more time and testing we could have dialed it in much better than we managed to do.

Larry's CanAm car was also one we would have liked more time to work with. Its iso-fulcrum design was well executed and incorporated some novel features. One of them was the use of the pans as part of the car's electrical circuit. They are made of fiberglass circuit board , copper coated on both sides. The lead wires are soldered to the pans in a way that bends them into self-centering springs for the guide with no bending at the point where the insulation ends. This reduces stress on the wire at the critical point where broken lead wires most often happen.

The copper plating allows the pans to be soldered in place on top of the iso rails and the pin tubes atop the pans. An upstop on the center section limits iso hinge travel. The area where it touches the right pan has had the plating carefully scraped away to prevent a short circuit.

The iso hinge is at the extreme rear of the chassis and the right side iso rail runs outboard of the Faas 37 tooth spur gear. The front and rear portions of the center are cut from a Parma I-32 chassis and are connected by wire rails. The iso rails kick up in front to locate the tubes for the split front axle. The motor, with its 9 tooth pinion gear, mounts to the integral motor bracket with a self-tapping screw and solder.

With legal minimum .790" PSE tires on the rear and .700" Riggen hard rubber fronts, the bottom of the chassis was almost 1/8" off the track surface. It looks as if Larry built this car for smaller tires and didn't want to totally rebuild it for one race requiring larger ones. We probably should have used the extra 1/16" under the car to stick lead to the entire bottom of the chassis and get the c.g. down a lot lower. It would be fun to race the cars all over after incorporating all we learned about them in the heat of competition.

The work Larry put into the chassis is matched by the effort that went into the body. It's an excellent model of Mark Donohue's 1972 car in which he came back to win a race after missing most of the series due to injuries from a monumental early season testing crash. George Follmer took the series championship in another 917-10K. Larry recreated the distinctive L&M red, white, and black color scheme with a mix of waterslide and peel-and-stick decals plus tape stripes and hand-cut L&M logos. The cockpit and driver figure are highly detailed even down to the driver's eyes and L&M logos on his uniform. The body, from an AMT/Matchbox static kit, mounts to the chassis with pins.

These really are better cars than their finishing positions might indicate. We all enjoyed driving them and, we understand, the T-bird has been traded to a local racer who will continue to develop it. This should be an interesting process to watch and see what the car's potential really is.

Larry also sent along two other cars for us to try out. One is his belt-drive NASCAR, which has been seen on the Web on several occasions. Built on a stretched Womp chassis, this car was slow but easy and fun to drive. This would be a terrific car for public demonstrations, group programs in schools, youth clubs, and similar places, and as a beginner builders' class in a club or raceway.

The other car was a Fly Joest clad in a Toytech Lexan BRM Group C car body mounted with pin tubes glued into the chassis. Larry painted it in a handsome green and white color scheme and fitted it with smaller diameter front wheels. He also cut an opening in the front of the chassis so the guide, lead wires, and motor can be removed as a unit without disconnecting the lead wires at the guide. Otherwise, the car was just as it came from the factory. We ran it several times on the big 4 lane Scalextric track at Fantasy World, and gave as many FW customers as possible a chance to drive it. The BRM was much quicker than a standard Fly car, the light weight of the body making a difference in both straightaway speed and handling. There are many Lexan bodies from Betta, Parma, JK. Toytech, Patto, Booth, Rhino, and others that will drop right over the Joest or other plastic chassis. They are not in the same league detail and scale-wise as the original bodies on today's euroscale cars, but they can be made quite presentable looking and, at $3-5, are one way to introduce a lot of variety to your 1/32 scale racing. (There are, by the way, those who consider the mere mention of vac-form bodies in the same breath as names like Scalextric, Ninco, and Fly a mortal threat to the future of the hobby, but here at OWH we calls 'em as we sees 'em, and this was not a bad looking car. Not scale, by any stretch of the imagination, and it will never be mistaken for a diecast, but not hard to look at, either.) If you are interested in plastic chassis/Lexan body combos, FW catalogs Betta and can supply many other 1/32 scale Lexan bodies. They also carry all the available Fly and Ninco chassis and parts as separate items.
 

There was only one true vintage car, that is, a car with original 60s chassis and body, entered in the race. That car was Eugene Smithson's Strombecker Ford J-Car. Considering what kind of competition he was going to be up against, Eugene is to be commended for entering a car that kept so closely to the real spirit of vintage slot racing.

This car could have come through a time warp, straight out of the pages of a mid-60s slot car magazine. Both the body and the adjustable length brass chassis are original Strombecker. Changes to the chassis consisted of cutting off the guide tongue and soldering one on in a slightly farther aft position to allow the 60s vintage Riggen-style guide to clear the body, and adding a 1/16" thick brass pan assembly to the bottom of the chassis to lower the center of gravity and give the car more weight forward. All the assembly screws were removed from the chassis and the two halves were soldered together and to the pan assembly. With the pan in place the car, sitting on .800" unidentified sponge tires at the rear and Russkit set screw wheels with .720" turned-down molded rubber front tires, teched at exactly the minimum 1/16' ground clearance.

The pan assembly ends just forward of the two rear body mounting holes. It has a hole drilled in it to allow access to the front body mount. The body is attached with 4-40 socket head cap screws threading into the original body posts with their press-on sheet metal nuts. For the race, we backed the screws off a couple of turns and secured them with model cement, as on Chris Briggs's cars, to allow the body to float. This, along with the weight of the pan and the traction of the sponge tires, gave the car enough handling capability to finish fifth, a very worthy result, given the competition.

Eugene soldered the Cheetah motor to the original rear motor mount and used heavy-duty lead wires and clips. The brass pinion and Cox plastic crown gave a 4.83:1 gear ratio to move its 4.6 ounces down the straights.

We drove this car with a 25 ohm controller, but it would have done better with a 15 ohm. The other available choices, a 4 or a 7 ohm, were not even close. If we had had the right controller for this car it probably would have picked up another position or two. Not bad for a genuine vintage car... not bad at all.
 

Rich's two NASCAR entries are what basement racing is all about. They are scale models on modified low-cost semi-vintage chassis -- simple, low-cost cars, neatly painted and detailed but not to the point where they are too "nice" to risk on the track. And, like the velveteen rabbit in the children's story, they have been knocked around enough to become very "real". They have the chips and scrapes that show how much fun Rich had with them before he sent them out west for us to play with.

The #2 car is a model of Rusty Wallace's 1992 Richmond winner and #18 is Dale Jarrett's ride from the days when he drove for Joe Gibbs. Both bodies are from AMT snap kits and use waterslide decals. They both have full roll cages from the kits and vacuum-formed driver figures.

The bodies snap onto mounting lugs on L-brackets at the edges of the lengthened and narrowed Riggen brass chassis. These are the old 60s / 70s Riggen chassis, not the current ones. The snap-on mounts are a recent conversion. You can still see the old pin holes along the bottom of the bodies.

When they arrived, both cars were shod with silicones at the rear. Before we replaced them with the AJ's sponge tires Rich sent along we tried them on the Daytona West track. The experience confirmed once again the wisdom of specifying sponge tires. The silicones did not work at all. The rear wheels are of the thread-on variety, while the fronts on both are set-screw wheels. #2 is geared 8-27 and #18 runs an 8-31 setup. They raced at 5.0 and 4.5 ounces respectively.

These are exactly the kind of entries we thought we would get more of-- veterans of their builders' home track wars rather than cars made new for our event. One reason why we picked NASCAR as a class for our initial race was the existence of a substantial number of cars like these two across the country. It was fun to drive cars that actually have a racing record behind them in among all the cars that represented a builder's guess as to what would be cutting edge enough to win. These are cars built to have fun with and to satisfy the builder, not to impress anybody else.

#2 and #18 come straight from the heart of American home track slot car racing. We were glad Rich entered them and we hope to see more entries of this kind in the future. Perhaps he might even consider running a mail-in race on his Leadmine Raceway, which captures the spirit of home track racing better than any track I have seen since the 70s.
 

We'd be willing to bet that the Parma Womp has been the basis of more home racing car building projects than any chassis still in production. It's a simple, strong, inexpensive chassis and so easy to cut, solder, and modify to fit just about any 1/32 scale body out there. Michael Posey took one and just started cutting and soldering until he came up with a chassis to fit his Gulf blue and orange Airfix Porsche 917 coupe body. He soldered in a piece of 1/16" brass strip on either side of the motor and used the edges of these strips as locators for the body. The result is a snap-on body mount that is as simple as you could ever imagine, using the bottom edge of the body itself as the mounting surface.

Michael did some serious carving on this chassis. He slotted the front axle holes to let the front wheel float up and down. He also opened up a large oval shaped hole directly below the Plafit Fox motor, which aids cooling. A large cutout between the motor and the front axle provides space to place lead at the very bottom of the chassis. We added lead under the bottom to bring the c.g. down and the weight up to 5.2 ounces.

Front and rear axles are both 3/32" in diameter. A Scalextric-type plastic crown gear and a 9 tooth brass pinion transmit power to the Parma MX tires. The fronts are cut down black sponge.

The body got a coat of blue and orange Humbrol enamel. Michael applied the waterslide decals with Micro Set and blotted them down with a sponge. The whole body was finished off with Testor Glosskote. Headlights painted with Tamiya clear yellow give the look of headlights turned on for night racing.
 

I had heard about a Bill Elliott McDonald's T-bird from Toybiz but had pretty well decided that it was one of those "mythical" cars that exists only in posts to internet DLs. Then I opened the box from Ray Snyder. He had put together a really neat looking car by combining this elusive body with a Champion vac-formed interior, a set of Larry Shephard's windows, and a stretched Womp chassis.

Ray's car comes from his stable of ten similar cars built from Toybiz and Revellogram bodies. His cars normally race with 16-D motors and the only significant change he made for this race was to swap in a Cheetah, which drives the Eliminators rear tires through a 7 tooth pinion and a 24 tooth crown gear. Tire diameter is .770" all around.

Ray cut the chassis amidships and narrowed it to just under 1 1/2 inches. He stretched the chassis by soldering square-section brass tubing along the sides, added pin tubes on top of the square tubing, and painted the whole chassis flat black for a neat, finished appearance. With just over half an ounce of added lead, #94 raced at 4.5 ounces.

This is another easy-to-build design that is ideal for a "spec" or beginners' class in a club racing program. It's not likely to set any world records, but a whole field of these cars would be a kick to race, as Ray has undoubtedly already found out through pleasant experience. You can tell that Ray knows what slot racing is supposed to be all about by the final instruction on his entry form: "Above all, have fun!"
 

You've got to hand it to anyone who enters the first slot car he's built in 27 years in an event like this. That's exactly what Scott Grandstaff did, and the result is a car that shows tremendous potential. When Scott gets a few more completed projects under his belt, his cars will be formidable indeed.

Scott started building this car quite late in the game after deciding that another car part way along was not going to do the job. Without a workshop full of parts and materials to build from he had to accumulate everything by mail order. He even went so far as to order a John Bacon body from Australia. He also had to fill in a 27 year gap in his slot car building experience with information gleaned from the Internet and emails from other builders, mastering new techniques and reviving old skills as he went along. Inevitably, there were delays and frustrations as he went through a steep learning and relearning curve. When he finished the car he had to send it off totally untested, as he has no track yet.

The 4.9 ounce car, built on a heavily modified Womp chassis, arrived for the race at the last minute. Without adequate testing and dialing-in, it still managed to qualify 4th in class, the highest qualifying car that was not totally scratchbuilt. Later, in the Race After The Race, Scott's car finished 5th, beaten only by three Proslot Demon conversions and Russell Sheldon's Mirage. This has to be the most remarkable performance of the entire event and marks Scott as someone from whom we will see great things in the future.

Scott modified almost every part of the Womp chassis. He narrowed and reinforced the rear end aft of the motor bracket to allow .750" wide rear tires within the car's 2.425" width. He cut the pan areas from the chassis sides and remounted them to fit the fiberglass body, attached with pin tubes, and allow it a small amount of float. At the front he incorporated bumpers ahead of the wheels. He reinforced them with a piece of wire bent to fit into the rear edge of the raised area around the guide post hole.
 

The body had to have sheet styrene extensions added to the bottom edge on each side to make it deep enough to clear the motor. Scott painted the car maroon and added a vac-formed interior from Betta.

For his efforts, Scott is a co-winner of the Acme Steam Irons Press On Regardless Award, given for persistent effort in the face of unusual difficulties. On his entry form he wrote, "I am anxious to find out if I remember anything at all."

Yes, Scott, we'd say you remembered a lot.

If we had a prize for best written entry form, Alan would get it -- no contest. In fact, he tells the story of his project so well we're going to let him do it here, with just a little editing and a few comments:

Alan writes:

"My 917 is drawn very heavily from Bob Ward's OWH piece, "Vintage Euroscale Plus". He pretty much tells you how to do it, so I'll focus on a few differences, my reasons for them, and a few missteps that may be enlightening.

The Proslot Demon chassis is waaaaay to long -- bad enough for a 936 but really tough for a 917. I began by cutting 0.58" from the center of the chassis, cutting across the outer rails and the inner tongue. Rather than overlap I butted the joints and used the cut-off sections as gussets to silver solder it back together. Based on the rear axle position the guide would not fit under the nose, so I cut the guide tongue off and shortened it. I drilled and tapped it for 2-56 threads, then bolted it back on with a .050" spacer to raise it above the plane of the chassis. I used bolts rather than solder to allow easy experimentation with guide height vs. chassis clearance.

The pan section was similarly shortened. I butted and silver soldered the resulting joint and reinforced it by soft-soldering the body mounting angles across the joint.

Rather than use wire hinges to connect the two I wanted something more positive. I drilled and tapped the pivot points on the pan for 2-56 screws and drilled #44 clearance holes in the corresponding points on the center chassis. I used filister-head screws and lock washers as pivots, allowing free rotation but little twisting between the parts. Bob fastened his front axle to the center frame, but I already had too much going on there. The stock axle positions on the pan were too low for the scale wheels so I filed semi-circular notches in the axle tabs and soldered a piece of 1/8" o.d. tubing into them.

I used set-screw-modified Cox Ford GT wheels sleeved with 1/8" o.d. aluminum tubing to fit the 3/32" axles. I left the motor mount in place and bent the rear of the chassis upward after filing the front of the right axle support so it would bend squarely. I tapped the motor can and used a 2-56 X 1/4" cap screw and spring washer to secure the motor in place. Later, against all I once knew about permag motors, I soldered the other end to the frame.

I modified a Parma low-profile graphite guide to fit the slot on my Scalextric track and we went for a spin. The car was nice and smooth, forgiving, and reasonably quick as long as I barely cracked the throttle. Wide open it spun the tires all the way down the 17 1/2 foot straight. To find out how it would go on a routed track wit glue I'd have to wait and see. So, I had a rolling chassis with body mounts in place -- a slam dunk, I thought.

Not quite.

I tried to set up the body mounts as in Bob's article. His 936 has straight sides, but the 917 body has a lot of curvature at the bottom so the sheet plastic sockets need to be set in from the car's maximum width. Some cursing, a few basswood shims, and a lot of CA plus "final fit" by Dremel did the trick. (The easy way to do this would have been to replace the lower body sides with sheet styrene. The rules permitted straightening of the body sides. --Bob.)

Then, on to painting. Years ago, when decent gloss aluminum was not available in styrene compatible paints I primed my Mercedes with flat white alkyd spray. With this protecting the plastic I sprayed with aluminum lacquer and finished with clear Krylon -- tedious but very effective.

Modern technology came to the rescue, I thought. A visit to my local hobby store turned up something called "German Silver" in a spray can for model cars. Great, I thought, a one-stepper! Bah! Phui! Dust and separating emulsions be upon you, Testor! It came out a sort of " candy apple" metalflake silver that was really odd-looking, but by then I was out of time. I applied old decals with old fingers -- not my best job, I'm afraid. If one wanted to be charitable one could ascribe the lack of decoration to hasty pit work following a shunt in practice.

For rear valence detail I glued motor bits from the kit to .030" sheet styrene and CA'd it in place. Not perfect, but better than a bare brass frame hanging out. I broke one mirror getting it off the sprue, but they probably wouldn't have survived the first practice, anyway. (The remaining one didn't. -- Bob)

I put a full cockpit interior in the car and then ended up grinding away at it trying to make room for the test prod wire I like to use for lead wire. Finally I had to go back to the original lead wire. (Which worked well in the race. --Bob) I worked on it up until the night before the last possible shipping date."

That was Alan's account of how he built his first car for a proxy race since 1962. Actually, the car is better than his narrative and the car's race results make it look. Alan found himself in the position faced by most of the teams that tried to challenge Team McLaren in the days when it ruled the CanAm series. He had a good design but ran out of time for development work. He was forced to prepare for the proxy race in the midst of some extremely trying and time-consuming personal circumstances, but he wanted very much to support the race, so he completed his entry and got it to us in time to participate. For his effort, he is a co-winner of the Acme Steam Irons Press On Regardless Award.

Now, I have Alan's car here in pieces. He and I have been exchanging emails, and I'm going to give it the development it would have received if he had had time to do it. When I'm done, there will be a follow-up article with the results.

If you raced slot cars in the 60s or early 70s you probably had at least one car with a Dynamic chassis. With these wonderfully versatile chassis you could use almost any motor, any body, and any wheelbase you could possibly want. They were so easy to work with -- everything always fit together perfectly with a few screws. If you experimented with one a little, you could often make a highly competitive car out of it.

There must have been millions of them produced, as they are still plentiful today, and many of them are still in use. So, it's not too surprising that one proxy race entrant, Joe Ginelli, found one in his spare parts box and saw that he could easily make a NASCAR entry out of it.

Joe equipped his car with Parma #699K rear tires. He used a steel pinion and a Cox crown gear for a gear ratio of 3.85: 1. We added a little extra weight, bringing the car's racing weight to 4.6 ounces. Joe used an original Dynamic guide flag with modern braid adapted to fit.

The Toybiz Thunderbird body remains in out-of-the-package trim, which yields a simple but attractive complete car. Joe used a vintage 60s body mount, reinforced with square brass tubing, and attached the body with two self-tapping screws in each side.

Joe's car is very much in the spirit of vintage slot car racing. With a 60s body it would be a total blast from the past. In his entry form, Joe said he assembled the car from parts he had around the garage. Joe, we think, is typical of many home racers who enjoy seeing what they can make from all the various bits and pieces they have accumulated. They often assemble cars that turn out to be much more than the sum of the parts that went into them. We're glad one of these cars, a link both to the past and to the heart of home slot car racing, was a part of the first Daytona West / Old Weird Herald Proxy Race.

From the very first, the proxy race organizers planned for an additional race that would allow the Daytona West regulars, who were not allowed to field proxy race entries because of the "home track advantage" to run cars of their own construction against the best of the proxy entries. The race also had another purpose. We thought it would be fun, after running the proxy race format, to have a race in which each driver could drive just one car and take it to its limit.

It didn't quite work out that way.

First of all, there were hardly any local cars present. The NASCAR RATR never even got run because there was only one local entry and it was really late by the time we finished the main event. We did run the CanAm RATR, but we discovered that everybody (well, almost everybody) was more interested in bringing their cars through without any major damage than in really going all-out to win. This news will be a relief to some of the proxy race entrants and a disappointment to others, depending upon how "expendable" they were willing to let their cars be.

One driver who did go all-out was Kris Kassens, driving my Gulf Mirage Proslot Demon conversion. He led easily until something went sour in the motor and cost him a lot of his straightaway speed. Another driver who was driving for all he and his assigned car were worth was Mister OWH himself, Paul Kassens, who took Scott Grandstaff's Ferrari 512 up to a fighting 5th place, an outstanding result for a car based on a Womp chassis. The Ferrari, by the way, is going home with the battle scars of a true warrior.

I had been looking forward all afternoon to going all-out with my Gulf McLaren / Proslot Demon against Russell Sheldon's Mirage. Then, as the cars sat on the starting line, I was seized by the thought that I had to write an article on the McLaren and take pictures of it sometime after the race, and I wanted it to be in one piece for the occasion. After that it was defensive driving all the way. I ended up winning the race, but mostly because Chuck Lawrence (the DW regular, not the vintage car collector) was being even more careful with Russell's car than I was with mine.

So... the whole RATR idea needs some more thought before we run the next proxy race. What would really be fun is if all the owners could be here to race their cars in person. Then we'd see either the hardbody race of the year or the demolition derby of the year, or maybe both, but it would be a race not to be missed.

In developing the format for the race we wanted to provide both a level playing field for all the entries and the opportunity for as many local drivers as possible to participate and to drive all of the cars. The "Official Drivers" were divided into groups of four and each driver was assigned to one lane. With each group of drivers we rotated all the cars through each of the four lanes in a round-robin system. The result was that each driver drove every car and each car ran on all four lanes. We had eight drivers for the NASCAR race. For the CanAm race we had only six, so Paul Kassens and I drove in both groups (Double your pleasure, double your fun-- get two tries at wrecking the cars instead of just one...)

We prepared the track for the races with a thorough cleaning and some running-in to develop a light "surface". We also added padding to the walls in all the impact zones. We found a thick rubber floor mat in a home improvement store. We cut it into strips and fixed them to the track walls with two-sided carpet tape. The tape wasn't up to the task, however, and the rubber kept gradually pulling away, so eventually we used contact cement. That solved the problem and the padding stayed put. Every car had more than ample opportunity to test it during practice, qualifying, and the race, and all escaped major damage.

As the cars arrived in the mail we began testing each one and getting it dialed into the track as much as possible. we added weight, checked guide height, adjusted gear mesh, and occasionally replaced parts that went bad in testing. We also tried to determine which controller resistance rating would work best for each car.

For the race days we had 3 ohm, 7 ohm, and 25 ohm controllers available. We would have liked to have a set of 15 ohm controllers on hand too, but none of the local race programs use them, so we couldn't come up with any. We kept notes on how each car drove with the different controllers. Based on those notes and the drivers' own experience with the cars each driver chose the controller with which he wanted to drive each car. We considered gathering four Ruddocks and letting the drivers adjust them for each car, but we would have had to rewire the track to use them. Also, few of the drivers had any experience with Ruddocks.

We ran qualifying even though the results didn't really determine anything. We wanted to have another basis for comparing the cars' performance. We also originally planned to use qualifying times as a tie-breaker, although, as it turned out, we used a race system that allowed us to use actual track position to determine the exact finishing order.

In the race itself all the drivers tried to maintain a sensible balance between getting each car as close to its limit as possible and keeping the car more or less in one piece. It was interesting to discover that even with all the detailing on some of the cars we ended up with very few broken pieces at the end of the day.

We kept learning things about the cars all through the races. In fact, we found that there were many cars that could have done much better if we had had more time to work with them, especially the ones that arrived at the last minute and didn't get the testing we wanted to give them. If we were to keep the cars another month, continuing to develop each one, and then ran another race, the second time around the lap totals would be much closer. This is one of the inherent limitations of the proxy race concept that we will try to work with more effectively next time.

We also learned a great deal about running this kind of event. One lesson we didn't expect is that the post-race work, especially generating all the media coverage demanded by the interest in the event , is almost as time-consuming as the pre-race preparations. This article and the accompanying drawings are a part of that effort. We want to thank all the entrants for their patience in letting us keep the cars weeks longer than we thought we would need to.

Everybody who drove the cars or participated in some way in the running of the race thoroughly enjoyed it. It's not often one gets the chance to drive and compare a whole fleet of slot cars with a wide variety of designs in one... well, two, evenings. This event has led to a big increase in interest among our Puget Sound area racers in 1/32 scale hardbody racing. And, judging from the comments we received from all the entrants, they had a lot of fun building their cars. We're looking forward to at least doubling the number of entries for our next proxy race, and from the response we've had, it looks like that won't be a problem.

Proxy Race Results & Photos!

email: bobward@oldweirdherald.com