As seems to be the case with me, I go through spurts of working on track scenery, followed by months of doing nothing to it at all and since the last update in November, it has been a lot of nothing at all.

Now this doesn't mean that I've not been somewhat busy, as I've managed to repaint several cars and build up a number of interesting resin cars. These resin cars are generally just bodies, and the manufacturer may suggest different chassis to use with them. The fitting of the rest of the running gear is pretty well left up to the builder and there are a plethora of sources that can be used. I've also found some ready to run types that have caught my eye and you can see some of what has been picked up from various sources to the right. As you can see, my tastes are pretty widespread as there are a variety of cars from Formula One, NASCAR, rallye, and Can-Am to name a few.

   My recent resin builds have been from RMS resin as they have come out with a number of interesting Can-Am bodies in the last several months. Two of them I've completed so far have been the very wide McLaren M12 with a high wing and the equally wide Ferrari 612P, built in the version without the tall wing. Both of these cars have been a bit of a challenge as it seems I miss on something or other when putting them together. Both of them run well enough, in fact, the Ferrari runs quite well. you can see those in with the various repaints and modified cars I've done in the last several months.

On other fronts, our club started a new season in January. There are three different venues this time. A typical season runs Jan to June with the next one starting in July to December. These are our standard road course and oval seasons of anywhere from 9-12 races each, depending on holidays and such. Added after a hiatus of two years, is a plastic track season, This runs all year and is also 9-12 races.

I'm not competing on the road course season as I found last year that it was just a bit to much to go racing every Sunday evening so cut back in Feb of 2009 to just the ovals for 2009. for the spring  2010 season, we are running 1/32 Plastic Cars of Tomorrow. These are cars built by Carrera, Scalextric or SCX with most running the latter two. I chose a Scalextric car that I repainted as Sam Hornish's  car from his rookie year. Though no company yet does a Dodge, the body styles are so similar that few notice the difference. The other oval car is a 1/24 scale winged sprint car. These are vacuformed bodies atop a chassis we've used a great deal over the last several years. The benefit of using the same chassis is that we can keep costs down and believe it or not, just by using different tires or bodies will change the way the car handles.

For the plastic track season, I'm running a Scalextric Porsche that has no changes but tires for the LMP class (that is the yellow car) and a Racer Daytona Prototype that I repainted into a more interesting scheme. I'd already snapped off the antennas and mirrors on this one so it was a prime candidate for repainting and applying custom decals that were made on my Inkjet printer. So far, I'm undefeated in two race nights (four events) on plastic track, but I'm sure that will not last. Club racing is a great way to do something different and gives me the opportunity to meet people I normally would never have seen.

June 2010

I hope you learned a bit and if you have any questions or wish to share your experiences or images of your track,  I'd like to hear from you on the subject so please e-mail me at mmreaders@aol.com.

Scott


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