Friday 20 March 2015

C3538 Boss Mustang Vs C2898 Chevrolet Camaro


When I first started working for Electric Tracks (Scalextric Racing) Many many years ago, my favourite car was the Boss Mustang. Scalextrics and Hornby had designed this model car that looked like well a car, big powerful and robust pieces of kit that were easy to mod, simple so change things around in and fairly robust. It was a general mix between the group of which was better the Camaro or the Mustang. I will always say the mustang but then isn't this the debate across the pond generally any way?
I digress. We now come full circle and we have a digital ready Mustang and a Digital Ready Camaro.
Gone are the old blue clip out guide blades and replaced with the digital guide, the chip sitting a little way back as with all cars of this modern digital era. What is the different between the original and the new moulding then?

To be honest not a lot. The Camaro has a fairly standard, magnet in front of the motor set up with no ability to change it's position, acts like most muscle and rear wheel drive cars where if you push it to hard into the corner or accelerate to quickly out it can fish tail or tank slap (depending where you are in the world depends on which reference you would use)
Fairly fast in a straight line, need to break a little early to stop it coasting off through the barriers and to get the front wheels down for the corner. All in all it is a nice car to drive if you know what you are doing and looks fairly good doing it.

The Mustang. Now the mustang carries on with having the variable magnet position and straight out the box it has the magnet mounted directly below the rear axle, giving maximum attraction to the track, as with a lot of the newer (post 2013) cars the thinner magnet and new positioning has increased the grip at the rear no end. The downside the mustang is a long nose car. With all that down force at the back the front is going to ride high and this can cause de-slotting when entering the corners, or in the case we have here using a mechanical lap counter completely missing all together.

With the pre digital set up there was room for a tiny circle magnet to go into the nose of the car, this kept the front end down when the back end was in the air. If you watch the video you can see the Mustang vibrating at the nose as it goes along this is the power in the rear wheels pushing the  nose of the car up into the air as it goes along. Don't get me wrong it is nice that they have finally allowed the Mustang to be able to join the other digital cars on the track but would have been nice if they could have left that front magnet in as well or the option to put one in.

Now you can counter this of course, small weight like a ball of blue-tac in the nose, I wouldn't try and force a magnet in though if you are going to go digital this could cause some issues with the electronics possibly to be honest I do't know. I am not an electronics guy. Just a possibly poorly educated guess. Though you could use a 5g or a 2g wheel weight in the body work of the nose this might be enough to keep it in the slot. Not to heavy though as you don't want to keep dragging the car on when breaking.

The video I am using new editing software and as i am now able to do the videos again I am still learning it they will improve over time once I get the hang of it, though I think this is the best way to do our reviews, video and words. Also New track Austin Texas, I finished building it and went straight out to do this video as soon as it was completed.


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