Not A Slot Car But It Sure Is Fast

There aren't very many retail slot car raceways around anymore. In the 1960's, there were more than 200 slot car establishments in any given state. Today there aren't 200 raceways in the whole country. If you are new to slot car arcing and have not yet seen a commercial slot car raceway, then no doubt you have not seen a wing car.

Wing cars are the fastest genre of slot cars. Measuring 3 1/4" wide and 8" long they are also the largest. Where as most slot cars at least resemble an automobile, the "wing cars" do not. They have a super lightweight lexan body that is wedge shaped and is shaped to conform itself just over the underlying mechanicals of the chassis and drive train underneath. Attached to the front is a stiff dia-plane that rides the surface of the track and scoops air over the body. The rear has a clear spoiler that extends up a couple of inches. Along the sides are long tall clear mylar air dams.

What this body system does, is funnel and trap high speed air between the air dams and caused a huge down force effect. This may seem counter productive for strait line speed, but rest assured with high RPM electric motors costing as much as $500 each. Some of these wing cars have achieved 66 miles per hour. Blink and you miss it. The reason these machines can get around a twisting road course is due to the incredible down force keeping the wing car planted in the slot as it traverses the turns.

You may be asking how such a crazy machine came out of a hobby that was based on putting motors into realistic car models. It is the ultimate progression of the need for speed. When the kids in the 60's just wanted faster cars and didn't care about scale appearance. This was a decade of car culture, where icons like Big Daddy Roth and Von Dutch built wild looking custom cars. Custom slot cars were destined to follow suit, and these slot cars were free to improve on aerodynamics, wheel size and center of gravity. Naturally this made them faster. They became what were called "thingies" by the scale majority as a derogatory term.

By the 1970's, thingies with air dams appeared and became the dominant form of racing for the next 25 years. This is why the derogatory term was dropped, since scale racers no longer participated in commercial racing. It was replaced with "wing car" which is the shortened easy way of saying winged slot car. Strangely, the wing crowd still classify their machines as 1 24 slot cars. Don't be confused, This just means they race on the tracks designed for 1/24 scale model cars.