1:24th vintage Sprinter - slot car!

[Layla's Keeper]

Well folks, have you ever wondered "Gee, what is it that LK does when he's not building model cars?" The answer, at least during the non-racing season (that is, the period between the checkered flag at the Sandusky Speedway Cavalcade and Memorial Day weekend) is that I race slot cars at a number of local tracks.

Most of my slot cars are pure bred racing machines like this Champion Turbo-flex w/handbuilt C-can motor (Champion Challenger II endbell and can, RJR armature @42degrees timing, balanced, blueprinted, and lathe trued) and Parma/PSE Ultimate Intrepid body.



But occasionally I build something a little more to scale, just for the fun of it. And with Fola posting his classy Aston Martin - which is way far from a racing piece with its one-piece chassis, rubber tires (instead of foam) and heavy resin body - I decided to one-up him by posting my personal work of art, my JK Products Sprint Car, constructed out of their stellar EDM steel kit and a vintage Booth Machine lexan body.






In this shot, I removed the front cowling so that you all can see the powerplant for this beasty. It's a sealed Parma Super16D, ample power for this lightweight and cheap at about $15. Completely overpowers the chassis, doesn't cost a lot, sounds like a scale fuel injected 410ci small block to me!




I'd say that for starting out as a laser-cut piece of flat EDM steel that looked exactly like this.....



It turned out pretty good. It always draws attention at the ovals where I run it (both Shifters Raceway in Eastlake and Rt. 93 Raceway in Akron) and while it doesn't handle nearly as well as my dedicated racing oval cars (I have several different 4.5inch stock cars, my favorite being my classic Trinity Racing Products Spyder chassis, no longer in production) the big tires and thumping Super16D give it some radical laps all the same.

What can I say, it's an illness.

[willimo]

Looks real nice. Bet it's fast, too. Fola's car might look more scale but yours is probably not only faster, but is better status equipped, you might say? Nice to see something from you, scale model or slot car or whatever. It's been a while.

[Layla's Keeper]

Oh it's wicked fast on the straights. About 40mph when it hooks up (which isn't too often. Those big Pro Track meats tend to spin if the track doesn't have some healthy stick to it). Of course, because the car has a high center of gravity, is a one piece chassis, and is wickedly overpowered (really, this chassis was designed around a JK Falcon/Plafit motor or at the outside a Parma 501 Deathstar, using the Super16D is pure overkill ), the cornering speed is relatively low.

Hence, unless I'm driving like there's an egg under the throttle at my hometrack (Shifters Raceway's tri-oval, which is a scale 3/8th's mile), I usually can't break lap times below the 4 second range.