MAGracing Forum

Today I had a company visit the racecenter to have fun on the slotcar track. (That's what i do for a living)

In the brake the asked to try the Magracing track, a short introduction and they was on, some of the guys had so much fun that they serius talked about getting into Magracing, I so far has many very good experience to show the track and car to strangers, and see how fast the learn to drive.


I just tried the masking tape on one car and must say that there i a lot more grip in that compared to electrical tape.

I would agree that one of the biggest stumbling blocks in approaching magracing is that most of us come from a slot car experience, and therefore are discussing them in terms of trying to to tune them with hotter motors and sticker tires etc to make they more like our slot car experience.

Total newbies have no yardstick and are willing to accept the lack of power and traction as trade offs to a more realistic racing/driving experience where strategy and patience are rewarded.

Speed and traction will surely evolve later, but if all we are going to do is hook em up and go flat out we might as well keep the slots.

I for one am anxious to get our cars and build a track so we begin to learn this new skill

Our track is painted with flat latex and all the cars have masking tape on the rear tires. I think traction is about perfect for the power that these cars have. Kinda like taking the magnets out of a slot car, a bit of a learning curve, but way more fun.
More traction will open a whole can of worms...starting with wheels spinning on the axle.
Somehow, we all accept buying a slot car and then replacing all the running gear with after market stuff. I like MagRacing for it's simplicity and realism.

I can't disagree with anything said here. It is true that people crossing over from the slot car world, by habit, come to expect lightning fast performance. They also have their reflexes trained to attack corners much harder than can be done by tire grip alone. Often I have heard questions about the idea that increasing the size of the wire and the resulting magnetic attraction might allow faster cornering. But that is slot car thinking. It is akin to the idea of adding a larger wood guide to a slot car. Magsteer is another way of thinking about racing model cars and to some extent, we slot racers will need to retrain ourselves to a different pace.

That said, I still like rubber tires on nice wheels. The challenge for me will be to find rubber tires that are appropriate to the mag racing experience. All of the slotting world's tires are geared to more traction rather than less. And I like realistic looking model cars. I must be able to combine well detailed scale models with mag racing for mag racing to retain my interest long term.

I also like the idea of MAGracing. It is a chance to start new with out the status quo of slot cars. The basic principals of:
1. Realistic scale speed
2. Racing line / lane changes
3. narrower realistic width track surface
4. 16 cars at one time
But as far as hotter motors go, they will be needed to keep the experience the same with a bigger or heavier car, or a different genera or racing from sports cars.
My preferred type of car would be dirt oval cars, open cockpit, late model, modified, in 1/24th scale at about twice the weight of the current cars and with more detail.
I have bought 2 cars and am in the process of building a 8' (2.4M) x 12' (3.6M) sectional oval to start the journey and will most likely tweak and tinker to meet the goals stated above. In fooling around with the cars on the floor the throttle control at low speed immediately made me think rolling starts would be possible.

Brion