How and why the was born.

Or what one retired and bored toy designer did for fun and profit on a stupid bet.

 

Why TSR and its new, bizarre and oh-so different machine from the usual run-of-the-mill home-racing or basic commercial-raceway style slot cars? Because the designer felt that both are frankly unsatisfactory and somewhat detrimental to a hobby that is and has been in stagnation from a lack of new enthusiasts. How so, do you ask?

TSR was borne of a bet: a challenge of sorts placed by an Internet forum blowhard very critical of the state of the commercial-raceway deteriorating aspect. On one side, that of the home racing market, filled with ever more beautifully detailed home-racing cars fitted with sub-standard chassis performance and in many cases unable to run properly without a serious rebuild, so as to correct the designer's built-in mechanical flaws. On the other side, that of the commercial-raceway scene, with cars performing extremely well but afflicted with dreadful aesthetics only accepted by a few, and requiring serious expertise to be competitive in racing situations..

 

A new beginner-friendly vehicle was needed to bridge the gap between the beautifully accurate and detailed model cars offered as home-racing toys, on which most of the handling quality depends on the size and position of the added traction magnet, and the deformed caricatures of cars available at commercial raceways that turned off the vast majority of the potential hobbyists. There was little alternative, save for the complex Japanese  Plafit chassis system and its now numerous clones, again not exactly user-friendly to the beginner.

 

Philippe de Lespinay, a former toy designer and a dedicated slot car racer with a brief but very successful professional slot car racing history, now retired from a successful business career, picked up the gauntlet and designed a pair of completely new cars. As inspiration, he used the engineering of a 30-year old electric model racing car he designed for the COX toy company. This chassis design was very advanced for its time and was the predecessor of sorts of the successful Parma "Flexi" car that came eight years later and was capital in saving the commercial raceway industry from oblivion well into the 1990's. But the very design of this new "Flexi" car failed to provide the beginner with competitive  machinery as it took a true expert to set them up to race for the win, so the beginner never stood a chance of success even if showing superior driving ability. De Lespinay vowed to provide a vehicle that no one could "tweak", a sort of machine that would only respond to adjustments available to all.
 

The original 1972 COX "SuperScale" car was a 1/40-scale advanced design. It featured a glass-filled nylon chassis with snap-in angled motor, fixed preset gear mesh, smooth 64-pitch gears, flat-ribbon brass contact strips, pin-style guide and a floating zinc plated steel body mount retained by the guide screw and a snap-in independent front wheel axle system. No added axle bearings were needed as the chassis material provided the best and longest-wearing bearing surface possible. But the true revolution was the first-ever use in an electric model car of an added traction magnet, a technological breakthrough devised by the designer in 1970 and turned down by two companies to which it was offered. The COX company did not have such concerns and introduced the new toy in time for Christmas 1973, selling over 200000 racing sets featuring these new cars between 1973 and 1977. The chassis was flexible enough to fit Can-Am bodies as well as NASCAR stockers and GT cars, plus a pair of Indy cars, This Can-Am car and its "Manta" body, one of eight styles available was patterned after the successful pro-racing cars designed, built and driven by de Lespinay that dominated the 1973 pro-racing season in the USA and set new standards that have lasted to this day.

 

 

All in all and after the Internet challenged was placed, it took de Lespinay a mere 20 minutes to devise the new cars. Another 2 hours or so of old-fashion tracings produced a basic design, from which two hand-built prototypes were constructed. Stainless-steel wire was chosen over brass ribbon for lead wires, and the steel body-mount design received a reinforcing rib running the whole length of the pan for greater strength. The original guide was an aluminum pin that was dropped for production, a design mistake that has been since corrected.

 

The first hand-built center section was cut from sheet styrene, fitted and glued together. A brass rear axle-tube was used as the styrene was too weak to provide a decent bearing surface. Contact rails jumped over a front-magnet pocket that was never used as it proved unnecessary. Indeed de Lespinay was first to introduce this since much-copied feature on a modified FLY car as early as 1999. The prototype was somewhat smaller than the actual 1/24 scale production vehicle.

  

 

 

 The first prototype of the 1/32 scale version was much closer in size and design to the actual production car, that is except for the motor's direction of rotation. The hand-cut steel body mount was not yet adjustable, while the front axle had 3 possible adjustments. Both cars featured an aluminum pin guide that was mistakenly not used for production. This was later corrected and is now incorporated in all the new kits and RTR chassis and can be retrofitted to any.

 

 

This is a picture of the original prototype of the 1/24 scale car. It does show the main features seen on the production unit following the thinking behind the original Cox car of 1972. An injection-molded nylon chassis filled with glass particles fitted with a  snap-in motor, fixed gearing and "invisible" lead-wire system, on which a steel body mount also holding the front wheels "floats", providing the accurate and precise handling necessary for superior on-track control, something that the common home-racing cars are unable to provide today without extensive tuning.

 

Both prototypes seen from track side show the unfairly much-maligned fixed-guide system, magnet pockets and basic, simple design.

These cars were intensively tested and showed excellent behavior with built-in over steer qualities easily controlled by the fitment of tires of different compounds depending on type of surface used.

These pictures were shown of the OWH forum in early 2002.

A fierce discussion ensued online in which plenty of critics voiced their opinions in pretty harsh language, calling the prototypes "obsolete", "ridiculous" and "a joke". They were proven utterly wrong later as the production cars began setting records on many home-racing tracks where they were tested. But the guide blade replacing the guide pin became an immediate problem and a return to a tapered stainless-steel pin resolved it.

 

 

Undaunted by critics, de Lespinay pursued the idea and the first serious engineering drawings were made in 1/1 size on simple vellum, then converted into a CAD program so that molds could be built using the latest methods by high-precision machining. An American company specializing in injection molding of  pharmaceutical products was selected for this mission. On this pencil tracing, one may see the basic features retained on the production cars, most of which proved very successful.

 

A second series of six 1/32 scale prototypes were constructed using a sheet-styrene hand cut and glued pattern from which a rubber mold was expertly cast by Victor Ferguson of TrueScale in Tustin, California.

These ABS-plastic chassis featured the 9-way adjustable wheelbase and used the pre-production steel body mounts cut through EDM-wire machining, stamped in shape through an aluminum fixture.

These chassis were fitted with 3/32" flanged ball-bearings because unlike on the production items, the ABS plastic was unable to provide a reliable bearing material for the rear axle.

 

Slot.It aluminum wheels and Sonic gears were used on these six models. Here, two of the prototypes show the wheelbase adjustment capability of the new little car as well as the final lead-wire configuration with the motor running counter clockwise. This was selected because the positive lead wire had to be shunted to the can to ensure the same directional ability as of any other home-racing slot car, and available space made it difficult if not impossible with a "standard" rotation.

Much testing was done with these prototypes which all survived, but the plastic blade guide began to be a problem. When tested on routed tracks featuring very narrow slots, the guide blade showed its major defect, as it was binding as soon as the car drifted beyond a relatively shallow angle. While this did hardly affect the car when used with a traction magnet, it revealed a serious handling flaw when the car was used on non-magnetic routed tracks with very narrow slots.

 

 

 

A FLY Porsche GT1-98 body fitted to one of the second-series prototypes, summer 2002. These cars were sent to an IMCA event in Holland with pro-racer Chris Radisich and impressed many present by its much smoother and quite superior performance compared to the usual home-racing production cars. But the designer failed to seize on the fact that the guide blade was binding inside narrow slots and caused the car to jerk violently under extreme conditions, sometimes breaking the guide blade.

 

The next move was to establish computer-aide designs for manufacturing the tooling, and this was accomplished by an ex-employee of the Boeing aircraft company.

 

No other prototype was built of the 1/24 scale car. A very serious risk as the production car was much larger than the original prototype and quite different in many ways... The first injections required only minor adjustments. The first test of the pre-production 1/24 scale car was run at Buena Park raceway and the car showed instant performance but too much mechanical grip. The over-steer queen was now under steering...

 

The smaller car was tested on Carrera and Scalextric tracks mostly with a traction magnet and FLY tires and appeared to be performing satisfactorily, if a little too quick for some.

Tire compounds were tested until a reasonable compromise between traction and wear was found. The supply of Chinese-built motors arrived about that time and proved to be excellent both in performance and reliability.

 

Next was to devise an attractive and simple packaging, and... voila. The kits reached the shelves just in time for Christmas 2002. The product was successfully launched and has been controversial ever since, generating enthusiastic love or hate depending on the personality and taste of the users...

This is a picture of the very first prototype packaging before permanent tooling was devised.

 

Next step will be the production of a true ready to race finished car with an injected plastic body.

 

After it became clear that the Cox-style blade that worked so well on the Cox-modified Eldon track, was binding in the very narrow slots of the most commonly-used tracks, TSR changed the design and replaced the blade by a stainless-steel tapered pin. The change transformed the cars and put them right up with the very best product available on the market in handling smoothness of operation and reliability.

 

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