long newb intro w/ a dragtracks setup- track and car observations to this point.

just figured id intro myself and post my observations.  

My name is Mike, and im reliving my youth through my nephew.  I work on cars for a living and race them.  My brother in law races cars as well.  His son is kinda into cars but at 5 yrs old has his head buried into an ipad. I dont personally ahve any kids right now and dont get the whole staying inside the house thing.  I figured he has hotwheels, get him a drag strip for his birthday and get him outside the house and in the garage with his dad and i.  I know i use to play the hell out of my roll up drag strip as a kid. It appalled me that he didnt own a hotwheels drag strip! 

After hunting for a hotwheels track with no luck at local stores, i turned to the net.  i really wanted to get him the 6 lane track and add section to make it a scale 1/4 mile.  In my research i seen they retail @ 80-ish  but could be bought on sale for 50 around x-mas time.  Yet the 6 lane track sells for big $$$ on ebay, so i grabbed a drag track setup.  We set it up in the home garage where my nephew and us play while working on our own cars.

our dragtracks setup--

i bought the setup from jegs.  In addition, i bought extra track so i can make it a scale 1/4 mile as well as the power adapter.  so the finish line is roughly 20 feet long as i added 3 pieces of track and used the 4th extra piece as a runoff lane.  Wish the cable was longer on the finish line.  it is stretched tight

cons to the track-

it was a little tricky for a 5 yr old to get the hang of it at 1st.  the stock starting line is a little tall for him but he is managing.  The volume is turned off--that got annoying quickly.  Also had to take the starting line apart to fix the pin drop motors as they would jam.  

Last gripe is the timer.  In a real drag race, i can sit at the light for 20 seconds for a terrible reaction time, launch and run a 10 second pass w/ a crap r/t.  heck, it seems like during qualifying run at the real strip you will always have a turbo car brake boosting and bad r/t to come up on the chip to launch under boost to run a good qualifying time.  Yet in elims they get treed and loose.  not knocking turbo cars, as thats what we run off a pro tree.  so we bump in and come up on the chip and launch hard.

Yet drag tracks adds the r/t and the et in together.   so if i cut a .07 light and run a 2.0-- reality is the car went 1.93.  Also wish you could run the cars w/o the tree but still have the lane winner pop up just to speed things up.

pros to the setup-  aside form the starting line-- rest of the track is solidly built.  has lasted 6 weeks w/ a 5 year old playign the hell out of it daily to this point.  Easy to setup as he has to set it up and break it down after use.  

car observations based off the past 6 weeks of running 64 car elims on saturday night.

all cars are run stock how they come out of the box.  we are rookies and dont know the proper terminology for hotwheels stuff yet like tire differences or what a treasure hunt car is etc.  We just grab stuff that either looks cool or at this point we dont already own lol.  Next winter we will look into modifying them.    

basically we have our 64 car base field.  When we buy new cars we run them against random cars pulled from the existing 64 field to see if they make the cut.  from there we figure out are slow exisitng cars and weed them out. to get our new 64.  

when i 1st bought the track we burned through about 400/500 existing cars to get the best 64.  cars ranged form old hand me downs from when my brother in law and i were a kid to stuff his son had amassed.  From there we had our own march madness.  whittled the field down to the fastest base cars.  at this time the cutoff was a 2.0 et after subtracting r/t.  our fastest car after day one was a 1.91 car  a grand sport vette we grabbed at walmart same day the track arrived.  Surprisingly the 2nd place car was a white van like the that had a 87 trademark on the bottom but was a reissue from my understanding.  Looked like the A-team van but white and screamed free candy.  My nephew had "painted" it black with a sharpie and it has since gone mia in the garage.

pretty much every week for last 6 weeks new cars have arrived.  between allowance money, easter bunny etc-- atleast 20 cars a weekend have popped up it seems.  Last week for easter was a big haul as was this weekend.  As i grabbed 40 cars new in package from a  pawn shop for $20, nephew bought $10 worth, brother in law bought a few, and even the grandparents are buying cars now after seeing the track at easter.

 I know if i go shopping im grabbing a $5-$10 worth of cars for him..  it is funny as a big ziplock bag houses the top 64, the "slow" cars are delegate to a huge box where they either dont get played with or are bath tub fodder. Numerous cars have been taken out of the package, gone slow down the track and delegated to the box of death.  

with that said, our field has went from a 2.0 down to a 1.95 for 64th place.  Far cry from when our old champ was a 1.91 and is barely in top 32.  Our fastest car has clocked a fastest of 1.83 with a group of 12 cars in the 1.85/1.87 range.  

The champion for the past 3 weeks has been a lambo that is slow out of the hole yet comes around every comparable time car on the big end.  it will have an occasional loss on a close race, but has yet to loose 2 out of 3 when we run back up races to see if the winning car can duplicate it.  

other car observations

anything that made its way into the bathtub at one time was junk.  

all of my brother in law and my old cars from the lates 70's to early 90's were slow as molasses.  made me sad to see my favorite cars as a kid get waxed by some monstrosity that is labeled as a car but looks nothing like one. 

corvettes in general seem to be fast out of the box.  the blue and yellow grand sport we grabbed at walmart being the fastest.  even bought a 2nd one to run the 1st one with almost identical times.  they were the fastest cars at 1.91 until the lambo showed up in week 3.  now it is not even in the top 10.  

the 60's muscle cars with the chip foose pro street like styling are generally slow.

the drag cars with the fold out wheelie bars are also slow as balls.  look cool but dont move well.

we have yet to find a matchbox branded car that can crack the top 16.  heck, we dont even have one in the top 64 now.  

top 5 fast cars as of tonight-- 1)lambo 2) 69 mustang funny car  3) mercedes c class amg 4) datsun z car from 2007 series w/ red swoosh on bottom (only car we have w/ red swoosh on bottom? bought it today along w/ 39 other cars new in package from a pawn shop for $20) 5) bentley gt


question to those of you who read this long winded post to this point-

what are you guys getting for your fast times and from what distance/track setup?  i.e.- stock starting line and finish line, or stock finish line w/ 3 pieces of track added to get close to scale 1/4 mile etc.

this should hold us over until weather gets nicer and we are in real cars on the track or boats on the water.  I will definitely be hunting for a 6 lane track come christmas time when price are more reasonable.  

thanks for the time

Mike