HW racing... with one lane?

I've had this week off work and today I had the house to myself. What does that mean? Hot Wheels time!

I don't have a lot of track, so I set up a long single lane track. I sent a couple of cars down at once - The Ferrari 458 Italia FTE, and the non-FTE version. Unsuprisingly, the FTE car pulled away quite happily from the non FTE. I ran them again with the positions swapped, the non-FTE at the front this time. The FTE version ran the whole length of the track on the non-FTE's rear bumper. This gave me an idea...

It reminded me of a style of street racing popular in Japan: Touge. There are lots of variations of this style of racing, but one kind is where two cars race each other in a nose-to-tail formation down a narrow mountain pass. It's too narrow to overtake. Instead, the lead car is declared the winner if it can pull a large lead over the chasing car. However, if the chasing car can keep up with the leader then it is decalred the winner.

And so this was my idea: Hot Wheels Touge. using just one lane, I would send the cars down in pairs, a leader and a chaser. The race is ran again with the cars swapped positions. To win, you must increase the gap to the car behind as the leader, and tailgate the other car as the chaser. I picked 16 cars for this experimental race.

The race was great fun, with some very close battles that needed a re-race to decide! Some cars were clearly faster than their opponents. The VW Karmann Ghia pulled a huge lead over the Baja Beetle before it fell out of the track. In the reversed race the Ghia actually pushed the Beetle across the finish line!

Overall, this was a fun race. It's worth giving a go yourself, especially if you don't have that much track. It's not exactly scientific though, as the close races somtimes require a judgement call (is a 1CM gap across the finish line enough for a win?). Still, we all like to experiment with our HWs, right?

Here is the line up and result for the race... thanks for reading!