Model Land Rally Project - Setups, hints and tips

4-Add on Lead (magnets removed)

2- Lack of grip (SCX tyres)

1- Dirty gears

3-Glowing chassis

Some people don´t pay the necessary attention for the conditions of the pinions and crowns. Every time you take a couple of laps on your circuit a great quantity of dust can accumulate in the gears. If you take some weeks or months without cleaning them properly the performance of your cars is certanily decreased. The engine can even overheat in extreme conditions.

Cleaning the cars every time you put them on track, specially if your have a rally circuit, is vital for their preservation. Some rally circuits have many scenery effects which can also accumulate in the gears ( see photos ). So take good care of your models cleaning them inside.

I also reccomend you change the lubricants and grease from the gears every two months if you don´t race too often. The dust grasps to these lubricants ruining the top speed the engine could provide.

If your cars are de-slotting or even overturning on every curve there might be a lack of weight on the rear or on the centre of the lower part of the chassis. The excess of grip also makes the car overturn but grip enough is very good, what we have to do is to balance with some weight.

Add a 5-gram adhesive lead weight on the rear or in the centre. Remember too much grip and too few weight causes you model to overturn even in medium speed. Much weight can encrease the reliability on curves when you drive in higher speed but can diminish the speed on the straights. So you must have in mind that the good performance depends on the balance between weight, speed and grip.

In rally races is nice that the cars drift their rear freely, so it depends on the track roughness too. Some tracks like SCX have a very very rough surface. This excess of roughness is another problem for the good performance because It also makes the car to overturn and to de-slot more frequently. Besides, that makes your tyres wear out much faster then normal. To solve this problem, you can paint your SCX tracks with paints (dirt colours if you have a rally track), this way you can soften a little the surface of your tracks making the cars swing their rear perfectly without de-slotting.

This is a very common problem in Scalextric cars: The entire chassis glows around the rear and front lights. It happens because of the inadequate under masking of the chassis. To solve the problem, open the chassis and paint black around the lights slots. (use plastic removable paints)

Before applying mask ->

The greatest problem of SCX rally cars is certainly the tyres. They don´t have much surface contact with the ground making the car skid too much the rear. The grooves on tyres diminish the contact with the track causing a loss of performance in curves and at sudden accelerations. (In other words those straight grooves don´t work in slot racing the same way they´d work in real races)

Low surface contact area with the ground

And in cars like Subaru Impreza this problem is even greater because of their narrowed design. As greater the distance from the brades to the rear tyres greater the chances of the rear skid outside the curve.

I suggest fixing a lead inside the car, but its most advisable that you change the tyres. Replace the scx rally tyres with SCX DTM type tyre (slick tyres). You´ll note a great difference after putting them on. I´ve improved somewhat around 1second per lap with these new tyres. (...One second per lap in slot racing means a lot!)

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