Why has Scalextric decided to go with a in line motor set up ?

[Wayne txt]

Why has Scalextric decided to go with a in line motor set up ?

a lot of us preferred the side winder configuration whats your thoughts .

[Victorylapper]

I can't speak for Scalextric, but I've been selling their products for a long time and I've learned a few things doing business with them over the years.

I suspect that what is at the root of the recent changeover to inline cars may have been the now-abandoned Pro Chassis project.  If you aren't familiar with it, it was an attempt to move Scalextric cars a few rungs up the performance ladder. Scalextric cars are made primarily for the "toy" end of the slot car market; therefore thay are quite basic (or perhaps conservative) in design as slot cars go.  The Pro chassis concept was supposed to give people who liked the looks and quality of Scalextric cars but wanted a lot more performance a way to get it without having to go through a "kitbash" project to mate the body to a more sophisticated chassis for more intense competition.  Scalextric made them upgradeable to something more like high-end cars such as Slot It and NSR.  In fact, the Pro chassis were designed in cooperation with Slot It and accepted Slot It motor pods and mechanicals.  

The use of a podded chassis meant that your Scalextric car could be an inline, a sidewinder, or an anglewinder, whichever was the hot configuration for whtever kind of racing you were doing.  Since most Slot It cars come out of the box with inline motors, at least where the "packaging" requirements of the car being modeled permit it, somebody in the design department very possibly thought that must be the way to go and that Scalextric's standard chassis designs might as well fall in line.  

I've always suspected that the use of sidewinder chassis by UK and European manufacturers has more to do with making room for full-depth interiors than with performance considerations.  Through most of Scalextric's history it has produced mainlly inline cars and my impression is that inline is the preferred layout with many racers on the Old World side of the Atlantic, especially for non-magnet racing.  With the introduction of the Pro chassis concept the car had to be designed to accept any of the three chassis configurations.  That meant the full-depth interior, always a feature aimed more a collectors than racers, had to go.  That made defaulting back to an inline chassis possible. 

So... we get the new Javelin, among the first cars designed with the Pro chassis in mind, entering the world as an inline.  It is the only inline classic TransAm car in Scalextric's product line.  Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the car being an inline.  The problem is just that now one of the most eagerly awaited claasic TA cars is an anomaly in a big field of Scalextric (and Pioneer) sidewinders.  By their very nature inline and sidewinder cars have different weight distribution and magnet positions.  That creates problems for performance equaization.  There is now, for instance, no spec magnet position for all the cars in a classic TA field. This at least creates complications for rules makers and raises the possibility of the Javelin being either outlawed because it turns out to have an inherent advantage or shunned by the racers because it has a significant disadvantage.  It could go either way, depending on how the rules are written.  I suspect we will se a lot of Javelin bodies transplanted onto sidewinder chassis from other Scalextric TA cars, from Pioneer, or from the many 3D printers who are undoubtedly already hard at work on sidewinder chassis for the car.  In fact, if that kind of swap is allowed where you race, run, don't walk to you local hobby shop and buy a Javelin.  The car has a significant weight advantage ove previous classic TA cars at least partly because it doesn't have that full-depth interior tub.  Put that body and interior on your sidewinder chassis (or just swap the interior tray into your present sidewinder car in place of the full-depth tub) and you could really have a superior fighting knife for the 1/32 scale TransAm wars.

Another hint:  Take a good, close look at the wheels on the Javelin and compare them carefully with the ones on all the previous Scalextric/Pioneer TA cars.  You will see all kinds of possibilities. 

[Andy P.]

The intoduction to inliners is covered here:

https://www.scalextric.com/uk-en/news/testtrack/room-for-improvement/