Sloter Zytek tuning by Daren Morris

Well it has taken a while to write this article and I know the subject was covered in the forum by Rolltidevet, but seeing as I built this car to race in the Manufacturers challenge that was run at 132Slotcar Raceway, I'd share the set up and results of what I have done.
This is a great looking car and I had high hopes for it when first looked at it. I started off running the car almost in the same state as I had received it, but seeing as we were running non mag I decided it would be pointless to start testing with the magnet in place. So remove a few screws whip the magnet out, screws back on and off to the track we go!

Well I ran 50 laps and the best I could do was 7.685 which is disappointing on my 70ft Scalextric Sport track. So off to the work bench and a first thing was to sand the rear tyres as they were rather concave as you can see from the picture even with light sanding the tyres were rather concave.
Back to the track for another 50 laps and best lap of 7.571 which was an improvement but nothing spectacular. Now it was time to try something else, so I backed the body screws out one turn each and headed back to the track for another 50 laps, the car was a lot easier to drive and much easier to get into a rhythm and achieved a 7.482.
Next on the list was to loosen the rear motorpod screws ½ a turn each, this helped some but the fit was really tight and I would need to do some “light” sanding to get the motorpod to move freely, first back to the track for another 50 laps and a best time of 7.426 not much improvement.

Started playing with the motorpod screws but could not improve on my 7.426 time at this point I decided to sand the tyres more making sure I had a nice even contact patch! This made a huge difference as I chopped my lap time down to 7.191 almost ½ a second improvement with all the stock parts.

Now it was time to start with the “tuner” parts. Seeing as the rules dictated Slot.It S2 tyres I decided to try those first which gave an improvement but the tyres were cupped and did not give the best contact. Although after 50 laps I managed a 7.093 lap now well over ½ a second faster!

With all this fiddling around I decided it was time to go the whole hog and see what we could get within the rules of the Manufacturers Challenge. First off I installed the Slot.It orange end bell motor, sanded the motorpod and the chassis to make sure it all worked smoothly. I wanted to use SCX Prorace parts where possible as Sloter is now supported by SCX. Unfortunately SCX does not have bearings to fit into the Sloter Chassis so it was back to Slot.It for those.I used the SCX Pro rear axle,green crown gear( 27 tooth if I counted correctly) and 10 tooth pinion, I used the SCX Pro wheels and siliconed the S2's to the rim, sanded the front tyres down to make sure the were round and even, installed the 7mm deep guide (provided with the car) and SCX Pro race braid.Off to the track again for the final shakedown and what a difference!! 6.399 for a fastest lap and what an awesome car to drive. To put the laptime into perspective my stock Slot.It F40 with S2's was only running a best laptime of 6.608. Obviously the best upgrade is the motor and tyres. I love driving this car the way it is right now, very predictable, fast and forgiving. It also finished first in the inaugural Manufacturers Challenge but I expect the competition to be a lot tougher in the next round.

I would like to thank Dave Kennedy for his support in the preparation of this article.


Article and photos by Daren Morris.

Sloter Ferrari 312-#1 reviewed

Straight forward and exciting. Sloter's cars have given enthusiasts one cool little car after another, adding to that list is the latest 312 Ferrari.

The finish on the car immediately grabs your attention. Bright red with bright yellow striping. All perfectly done, no fading, no runs. There have been many liveries done by Sloter of this car but this may be the best...heck it's "No. 1" after all!

A walk around to the back of the car and we see a well detailed representation of the tail pipes and a very thin horizontal yellow tail wing.

The interior of the car lacks fine detail but gives you a good sense of the cockpit without going overboard with difficult to see (and expensive to reproduce BTW) dash details. The Jacky Ickx driver is less stiff looking than some drivers, which is a subtle detail I'll grant you but it does add to the overall feel of the car. The windscreen on the car is the usual clear/greenish plastic and is nicely done.

Deep dish gold wheels hold those surprisingly sticky Sloter tires.

Under the car we see the standard Sloter chassis with it's podless design. Gear mesh is smooth and spins easily when you give it the in you hand "thumb spin". As an aside, this is probably the first thing most slot racers do when they pull the car off the plinth and hold their new slot car for the time. There's nothing like a nice, smooth spin of the back axle is there? A lot can be gotten from this simple "test" of a slot car.
Does the axle spin easily? In this case, yes it does. Do those gears mesh smoothly? Yes, again. Is there sideplay in the axle... well yes, a bit. So there might be a spacer in this slot cars future, just to make sure there's not too much gear noise going around the turns. And in this case the axles are .098"...I just thought I'd throw that in there for reference.

A spin of the front axle and you can tell a lot as well. The axle spins well. The front tires do wobble a bit as do the wheels. There is a fair amount of sideplay on the front axle as well. But not much up and down float, I like this, it tends to make a car more stable in the turns. It would be nice if the car had less sideplay in both front and rear axles.

On the track at East New York Raceway wood track the 63 gram car (which is 2.47" at its widest point...again, just for reference) had some issues making fast laps. We got times for this car in the 6 second range. Which by standards of many other non magnet cars isn't terribly fast. We trued the tires a bit and the car smoothed out a bit but still I feel it would benefit from at least 15 grams of lead.

Sloter cars have quite a following. If you have a Sloter collection I'm thinking that no amount of verbage I or anyone will write really means much to you...you want this car I'm thinking. If you don't have any Sloter cars the Ferrari's have a nice feel to them and they have a very appealing body, and in this case the finish is another reason to grab up the latest Sloter 312.

Dave Kennedy
Publisher, Slot Cars Blog