Slotcar Track Design
The Demolition Derby controllers are equipped with a “Reverse” button. It’s easy to use and the cars respond immediately in either direction, allowing you to avoid a collision or make one on your terms!
Here’s the layout design offered by Life-Like. It’s an extended figure 8, complete with lane changers and the dreaded intersection. All curves come with guardrails, so you will have something to send your challenger over the top of!
The chassis are the familiar Fast Tracker chassis with the narrowed armature area and the pair of neo traction magnets and a second guide pin positioned at the rear of the chassis so you can haul in reverse as fast as you do going forward! Both cars ran very fast and were equal in performance and consistency. My 10 and 16 year old cover a nice cross-section of the youth market and I’m the old-fogey hobbyist that’s been doing this for years and my wife is the new-comer to the hobby and just learning what these cars can do. (Update! The wife has become quite the driver since the last review. I better watch or she may be writing the next one!) All four of us raced and had a good time on this track. The kids were both ecstatic about bashing each other in the intersection. My wife and I had a few passes at trading paint in the lane changers, but she was far better at clobbering me at the crossroad! The best thing I can say is that this set kept everyone interested!
Now we have gone this far into the review and it’s time to talk about the cars themselves. Both cars are a generic sedan, one blue, one gold. Each are equipped with a hinged hood and trunk lids that can be triggered to pop open when the front or rear bumper is hit. Under the engine hood is a red light that will flash when the front end is bashed a good lick! When you see that red light, you know you got whomped! The hoods push back into place easily and you are ready to start all over again.
One note of caution with these specific cars. There are several electronic components attached under the body and also to the chassis. When it’s time to maintenance your Demo-Derby cars, carefully remove the body and keep it close to the chassis, so as not to damage the wring that connects the red light or resistors that allow the forward/reverse movement. Other than those components, the chassis is the same as any other T-Chassis design and should be cleaned and oiled accordingly.
MONTVALE, New Jersey — Mercedes-Benz has been on a relentless quest to achieve hyper-safe accident-free driving since 1959, when it introduced the first car to feature energy-absorbing crumple zones. At long last, it’s getting pretty close to reaching its goal. The Experimental Safety Vehicle concept car essentially turns the entire vehicle into an airbag using novel metal panels that inflate moments before impact. The company’s first all-out attempt at building a perfectly safe car since the original ESF in 1974 is packed with technology designed to save us from ourselves. Mercedes recently opened the doors to its North American headquarters to tell us more about the …
