How To Race A Dozen Cars At Once

 First off, this is not a post about making 12 slot cars run on a digital track. If you googled that and got this far, turn back. 

Since before I bought this new batch of slot cars, which I'm going to call the 'Narcose Bunch' [will explain later], I've been trying to figure out a fair way to race all of them together. It's obvious that some cars are faster than others, and it pretty much breaks down by brand; Revoslot and NSR are fastest, followed by Slot.it, then Carrera. So what if I wanted to race all four brands in a Championship Series? 

There would have to be rules. First one would be part of the structure of the races. 

CLASSIFICATION.

If I were to race all these cars right now, the finish would break down something like this:

1. NSR

2. Revoslot

3. Revoslot

4. NSR

5. Slot.it

6. Slot.it

7. Slot.it

8. Slot.it

9. Slot.it

10. Slot.it

11. Slot.it

12. Slot.it

13. Carrera

14. Carrera

Now this would be every race. So the best finish on paper a Slot.it could hope for would be 5th. Now I gotta say, I think I've tuned those cars up pretty well to get them running on my track. All the Slot.its run no more than about a half-second gap from each other. The NSR and Revoslot cars seem to be averaging at minimum about 4/10ths a lap faster than the fastest Slot.it car. There are still things I can do to get their speed up, and I might do some of them; weight, improved parts, tires, etc. I have a few pairs of urethane tires that I might put on their respective cars to see how they fare against the competition. 

So what this all boils down to is that I'm going to have to set up a Classification structure. It would look something like this:

Unlimited Class - Revoslot and NSR

Sport Class - Slot.it and Carrera

This way the Slot.it becomes more competitive with each other, and it'll help focusing on improving each car to try and close the gap between the classes. Since there would be two classes, there would be two podiums. That will help each class be competitive within the class. Unlimiteds have a 75% chance of landing on the podium, but they could do much much worse. So a Sport Class goal would be to end up on the Ultd podium. 

Points will be awarded from 13-0, based on overall race finish, and not class finish. So if an Ultd really biffed a race and ended up in 7th or so, they'd get 7 points instead of 10 if they were issued based on class. This makes a challenge to the Ultds to not run a crappy race, and gives hope to the Sport Class.

You probably noticed that I included Carrera in the mix. Well, I decided to revive my two Carrera cars. I'll be getting tires for them and doing a few other tuning things, but mostly leaving them stock. I hope to do that order soon, but like the Championship season, it isn't going to start until well into January. Until then I have a last few weeks to tune them and run on the table for the last time. Since they're all so new I'm just mostly enjoying them, tinkering and focusing on just racing around. 

Since it's going to be on the rug, the season will be a series of shorter tracks. I don't know what the layout of the apartment will look like, since I'm waiting to hear from a few I applied to now. I should be able to get interesting layouts built in just about whatever I end up with. 

Already the NSR cars are super comfortable, nimble and fast. For a Slot.it to catch one, it's likely going to have to dress like one. It'll be a fun challenge to try to get there. I could see the Matra, or one of the Chaparrals doing it.

Oh right, the Narcose Bunch. Well, I live in Germany. I recently had oral surgery to remove some teeth and had to pay for the anesthesia. In Germany that's called Narcose. Well, I paid for it and it turned out it was covered on my insurance, so I got that money back and decided to buy slot cars with it. Hence the name Narcose Bunch.