The Electric Dream Team Test Track
In order to give you the most honest and accurate product reviews possible the Electric Dream Team has designed and built a layout especially for use in product reviews. It’s a 4-lane layout, built with Scalextric Sport track. It will be the site of our 1:32 scale car testing for product reviews and technical articles.
The EDT test track is a multipurpose facility, and will serve, over time, as a source of articles on track design and construction, scenery and detailing, and race procedures. We’ll also use it as a backdrop for photographing cars and other items for articles and for our on-line product listings.
We designed the track to fit the kind of space a typical home racer might have available for a layout in a recreation room or spare bedroom. It’s 12 feet long by 10.5 feet wide, fitting into an actual bedroom in a real house (mine) with space left over for a file cabinet and access to a closet in one end of the room. There is also room for a small table or desk, enabling the room to offer a basic office space for family use. The U-shaped 46-foot layout provides easy access to all points on the track for turn marshaling and provides good sight lines and ample room to stand for the drivers.
Another plus for the home racer is the tables on which the track rests. They are standard 5, 6, and 8 foot by 30-inch office tables we bought at Office Depot for $40 to $50 each. These tables form a durable and solid platform for the layout and offer several benefits besides. One is that their appearance fits better in a finished area of the house than tables constructed of plywood and 2X4s, especially if your interests don’t include making skirting or scenery. Another is the portability provided by the tables’ folding legs and the inherent modular quality of multiple tables, each of which is an independent structure. If you get transferred or simply move to another location, as happens fairly often to many people in our mobile society, you can simply take the track apart, fold up the tables, and load them in the U-haul. When you get there the available space will probably be a different size and shape. You can rearrange the tables easily to fit
. 
A look at our layout photos shows that the tables also offer lots of accessible storage space underneath, a feature that may make dedicating an entire room to your slot car track more practical. The plastic storage bins in the photos fit well under the tables and often go on sale in large discount stores for as little as $5 each.
The track uses radius 2, 3, and 4 turns in various combinations to provide a variety of driving challenges in a compact space. It has borders in all the places needed for good racing and uses more in other spots to enhance the track’s appearance.
Testing
The main purpose of out product reviews is to give the reader the most honest and complete a picture possible of what to expect from the review subject. We will tell you both the good and the bad because we think the more people know about a car or other product, even if it has some fairly significant problems, the more likely they are to buy it. Often a car is the only available model of a particular 1:1 scale car, but sometimes hobbyists will be deterred from buying it, even if it’s a model of a popular car, by uncertainty over whether they can make it run right. One major purpose of our reviews is to take away the uncertainty by finding and describing a product’s negatives, as well as its positives, and offering practical ideas for correcting the problems. Often a car can be transformed by a few simple adjustments or modifications. Knowing this frees the hobbyist to purchase the car he wants but has hesitated to spend his hard-earned money for.
We purposely limit the scope of our testing to an evaluation of a car’s performance in box-stock form and with adjustments and basic modifications easily performed by hobbyists of beginning to intermediate level skills. We also test the cars on power limited to one stock Scalextric C977 transformer per lane. One reason for this is that the vast majority of 1:32 scale slot car purchasers in the US run their cars on stock power and do not modify them heavily. Another is that beyond a certain point the scope of possible modifications available to the serious racer is so great we could not possibly cover it adequately in a product review and, furthermore, it’s irrelevant to most of our readers. We also believe that testing cars in stock form on stock power actually gives a good picture of each car’s fundamental character and quality that even the serious racer can use to compare cars and gain an idea of their potential for modification.
So, if you are a racer who runs highly hopped-up cars on a track with a killer power supply, please be assured that we are not ignoring your interests; we’re simply trying to keep the task of reviewing cars to manageable proportions and keep our articles interesting to as many readers as possible. We hope our reviews will serve as a starting point for your own evaluations.
One quality of any car that’s really important to us is versatility. By that we mean the ease with which a car can be adapted to perform pleasingly with widely differing degrees of magnet downforce. We all know that some cars are so magnet-dependent that they’re almost hopeless when you remove the magnet or even try to reduce the downforce. These are the cars that corner utterly stuck down until centrifugal force overcomes magnetism. Then the car breaks loose and tumbles off the track. We also know of cars that use magnets effectively to raise their ultimate cornering limits without making sideways motoring impossible and smothering the fun factor in brute downforce. Most home racers are far less interested in raising the performance level (and cost) of each of their cars to its absolute highest value than in simply finding a performance level and set of driving qualities they like and tuning each of their cars to match. We’ll try to point out cars that lend themselves well to this approach.
We’ll also be looking out for cars and other products that are especially well suited to beginners and children. Even veteran hard-core racers usually have a set of easy-to-drive, relatively crashproof cars they bring out when non-enthusiast visitors want to try out their track or when their small children want to “play racer”. And many people surf the Web every year trying to find good beginner cars and sets for themselves or for gift giving. Some cars stand up to this kind of use better than others, and our reviews will serve as a useful guide in making your selection.
Our review cars are taken out of our own warehouse, picked at random from whatever number of that particular item is on hand. We don’t get free review cars from the manufacturers or distributors, so we don’t have to worry about offending anybody and getting cut off from our source of products. We place no limits on the amount or type of testing we do on a car. We drive them to the limit, often finding the limit by exceeding it. If a car gets bashed up in the process, no problem. In fact, seeing how a car holds up to a certain amount of abuse is part of the testing.
We welcome input from our readers about any aspect of our testing and reviews. We may not agree with your input and we may not adopt your suggestions, but every bit of feedback we get will be read and considered. You can post comments on any of our reviews or e-mail us using the “Contact us” link on the menu at the left of the screen on our web site.
We also welcome articles from our readers on just about any subject related to any of the products we sell. If you want to write an article about modifying a car in ways that go beyond our product reviews, send it in! Or, if you want to write about track design, power systems, kitbashing, scratchbuilding, race organization, or your own track, cars, and races, send those articles in, too!
The Electric Dream Team looks forward to communicating with you.