Still More Cars & Competition

Periodic Failures, Occasional Successes & Other... Oddities
2 October 1999
	23k	Every so often, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, you end up with a car that defies every attempt to get it to run properly. At left is one of my current failures, a '77 Monza SS/D car. I can't recall a car that was a greater pain to "package" than this one; getting a S16D sidewinder motor in at a decent angle meant building half of the interior from styrene to avoid the thickness of the tape normally used to hold them in place. It won't take a tire wider than .275" x 1.014" without interfering with both the interior and the body. In two places. The lead wires have to pass down on the top of the motor before turning forward or they hit the interior and prevent the body from floating properly. The side and rear windows, made of .005" and .008" Lexan respectively,  have precisely .050" of overlap to secure to the body due to the height of the interior, blah, blah, blah.
click on a picture for a larger, clearer image
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Then there's the chassis. A succession of modifications, through 3-wire, 2-wire, .046, .055, .062, and .078" diameter wire, .062 and .074" diameter tubing, ballast in the nose, on pans, in front of, over, and behind the motor, on the wheelie bars, everywhere but dragging behind the car on a string. I've lengthened and shortened the wheelie bars. I've tried .960, .980, 1.00, an 1.010" tires, narrowed them, and balanced them. Frustrated, I even tried a wing. Nada, zip, zero. Five out of every six passes you get to watch the rear tires come off the track for the last 20 feet or so of the pass. The car would have gone on to some higher reward save for one consideration: on one out of those six passes, it gives every indication of being a really fast SS/D car. As in .004 off the track record held by a '97 Corvette fast. As they say: "So near and yet so far." It was the motor from this car (probably more than a year old without a rebuild - if you can't get it to run to start with, why worry about how well the motor is performing?) and one of my former '97 Corvettes that Gene now owns that we slapped together to include in a "Care Package" to send to "Boobie" Blankenship for the NorCal Global Nationals. Also included, among other woofers, were the Pro Stock (below) and the A/FC Lance White swiped from his brother Chuck (also below). I gather he did ok with them, if you consider TQing in SS/GTD, A/FC, and Pro Stock as "ok." So he had to have "Fast Eddy" Wong turn a few coms and replace some tires, the Pro Stock Truck only qualified second ("...and there was this smell coming from the armature after every pass." Gee. No smoke, too?), and the Factory Modified basically ******. Sorry. But, hey, the price was right.
Speaking of my dear friend Boobie, he keeps asking when I'm going to put some pictures of his cars on my site (the fact that I don't exactly have a ******** of my cars here evidently hasn't occurred to him yet). So, I think, how about a few pictures of the cars the way I get them from him, oozing, slimy, rusty, and reasonably well ****** up. Nah, way too scary for the average slot car drag racer: think "The Blankenship Witch Project."			35k
Thoughtfully, Phil Eddy forwarded me some shots he took at the Globals. Above right, "Freak Daddy " Bobby D*, in from Georgia for the race, attempts to counsel Boobie, at right, about the dangers of being perceived as an airhead when you're a blonde. Probably a lost cause, Bobby, but thanks for trying anyhow. Then there's that name on the side of the Camaro Pro Mod at the center right. Urban "Adult" humor, I presume. Sigh. Must be some cultural thing I'm not aware of. To the lower right is Boobie's version of the latest NorCal Class, Scale Fuel Altered, with a 4" maximum guide length, no wheelie bars to speak of, and scale tires soaked in naptha for every run. Hmm. Uh, guys, if you think that's fun, I have this really spiffy '77 Monza you'd simply  love. *Apologies to both Bobby D and Otis Pollard, whom I originally identified as being in the picture, above, with Boobie. Moral: never ask Boobie "O.k., so you're standing outside, a can of something in your hand, in front of an MGB, with another dude with a pony tail. Who is that?" because the first answer will be "That's me, man."			47k
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		A Pro Stock Cautionary Tale
	35k	A while back, looking over results from a few years worth of races, I noticed an interesting, if somewhat bizarre, fact: other than the first Pro Stock event I had ever run (1995, Mt View, CA), I had managed to make the Finals in every Pro Stock event I had ever entered, and had even managed to win four or five along the way and set a few records as a bonus. Two things bothered me about this; first a lot of it was luck, and second, I was still running basically the same two Pro Stocks I had started out with. They weren't much quicker, but everybody else sure was. Time for a new car, not to mention a new-generation motor. I sampled the opinions of a great many people on what to do, what to use, which direction to go. Then I punted. What resulted, as seen at left, is what I call my "Wrong" Pro Stock. In no particular order, contrary to  popular opinion and advice, I incorporated the wrong: chassis, chassis materials, wheelbase, guide-to-rear-axle length, wheelie bar length, uprights, tires, tire diameter & width, can, magnets, magnet bore diameter, armature, lead wire, gear ratio, body, and body mount system. Basically, it's a $20 DRS-160 Wire Chassis Kit with some .072 stainless tubing, funny car uprights, .400" wide foam tires, a few of Unc's favorite gimmicks, and a billet .450 Grp 27 motor. The chassis is simply an extension of the same style and design I've been messing with under everything from SS/D cars to Top Gun cars. I figured that if it could handle an open C-can, it could deal with a decent 27. I loaned it to Gene for the World Finals in Columbus, OH, a while back. The first test pass there, out of the box, glued by someone who had never run a Pro Stock before, much less this car, was a .639. He TQd with a .648. Not bad for a $20 chassis and a couple of guys no one ever heard of, I figure. The point of this, I guess, is to reinforce something I preach to whomever will listen: when it comes down to it, it's the combination that's important. Under most circumstances, no amount of great parts will overcome an inherently bad idea, but sometimes, if you're lucky, a decent concept will offer more than just the sum of its parts. I think of this car in that light; nothing particularly special, but it still runs pretty well. Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess. (2nd & 3rd pictures, from the World Finals, courtesy DRS)
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(note: if you can't figure how to duplicate this chassis from these pictures, you either need to find another hobby, someone to do it for you, or, alternately, start a chassis manufacturing company of your own. Just don't call your stuff "new" and "innovative." I guess "exciting" and "imaginative" are probably out, too, huh?)
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A few more of Unc's sleds The Pro Stock Truck at left represent more than just a nice body (and even if you hate the paint scheme, you have to admit that Tom Douglas did on heck of a job on it). It's sitting on an initial production run DRS SW-1 chassis, the first of a line of new offerings in the pipeline from Uncle Bob's House of Spring Steel. A few ideas in there from some middle-aged slot car drag racing guy, too. For $20, it's an almost jerk-proof answer for a good door-car (or truck) chassis. Loaned out to Clean Gene, this one runner-upped at our last National in a 12-truck field. Not too shabby for a piece with zero testing (so far) in it. The second picture almost shows off Tom's outstanding detail work a bit better (like four colors on the carbs and individually painted toneau cover ribs).	37k
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The white smudge at right, on the other hand, is what happens when a motor/chassis guy has to paint a body. And I wasn't particularly pressed for time, either. Thankfully, it runs a great deal better than it looks. Really need to get another body to Tom. On a recent visit to TR Motorplex in Ohio, I made a few passes after their Sunday bracket race and ran .735/.725/.719. Given that my experience with an optical, "roll-out" timing system consists of two trips to TR over 2 years, I have no clue what that relates to on a Trik Trax. Did manage to win our last National with it, however (and didn't take it near the Concours judging, either). The chassis is basically a wheelbase variant of the Pro Stock chassis, above, set up for a sidewinder, screw-in C-can motor.
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Just what the world needs - yet another flamed Camaro. To me, on the other hand, this is UCC-G5/R3 (ultralight c-can chassis, generation 5, revision 3). To you, it probably looks like a shorter DRS-49 funny car chassis with an odd nose piece and this funny thing in the middle. Usually in the form of Factory Mods, I've loaned both this series and its earlier versions out all over the country, looking for feedback and data. They've usually run fairly well (this car won our last National 'cause some Ford guy redlit with its cousin, G5/R2).	32k
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The beat goes on. This is an A/FC I built for The Supreme Troll, Chuck White. Everything you see on the Tom Douglas body is painted from the inside - no decals. I suspect Chuck has it slowed down to consistent Super Street times by now. (photo courtesy NCMHRA)	28k
(more when I get around to taking the pictures)
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Hardshells? Did Someone say Hardshells?
	35k	There's a scene in the Tom Selleck Australian "western" Quigley Down Under where rifle sharpshooter Selleck, after being dragged behind a horse and having the stuffing beat out of him, is forced into a quick-draw contest with a six-gun, a weapon he has always disdained. After drilling three bad guys, he looks down at Allan Rickman, the erudite villain, who is clearly dying with a quizzical expression on his face. "Said I never had much use for one.", Tom offers, "Never said I didn't know how to use one."
And what, you're asking yourself, could this conceivably have to do with hardshell slot car drag racing? Well, you see, some of my little friends are of the opinion that I have no clue when it comes to racing model-kit based slot cars. Not enough experience with kits or racing them, either. Well, first things first. I don't consider myself a kit collector. Having said that, I do have more than 400 car models, a few of which are visible in the ****** Polaroid picture, above. This pic shows mostly NASCAR and drag racing stuff, and those kits with some slot drag car potential. The wall opposite this one has the other car kits, e.g., foreign and road racing, as well as the gajillion plane and train kits I have (the tote boxes visible in the corner, 10 in all, each contain about 40 unpainted Lexan slot drag bodies each. I like those, too.). I own more than 50 pounds of sheet, rod, and strip styrene. Trust me on this: Unc know from plastic kits. The first slot car I ever built, in 1961, used the styrene body from a 1/24th scale 1959 Cooper Formula One friction toy. It had steerable front wheels, a brass tube chassis, Pittman motor (DC-71?), and broke into lots of little pieces when it finally crashed. I built my first slot drag car while I was away at college in '64, a Super Stock "A" Johan '63 Plymouth with a Pittman DC-65 motor. I raced it on 24 volts at a basement track in Illinois where, Woo, Woo!, California Rules, copied from Rod & Custom magazine, were in effect (some things never change, right?). So before you start goofing on an old, fat and slow guy like me, remember the prophetic words of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after the completion of the attack on Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." Don't make me have to work at this stuff, ok? You know how I get when that happens.

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