Confessions Of A Digital Newcomer

Carrera Pro-X Impressions – Before and After
by Kurt Moser

 

Before:

Great potential.  Will not replace analog slots.  Will be a ‘hobby within a hobby’.

People will get mad at each other for bumping into their nice new cars.  Lack of standards will sink digital.

 

After:

Great potential.  Will not replace analog slots.  Will be a ‘hobby within a hobby’.  No worries (for me) about lack of standards.  Nice new cars? What nice new cars?!  Normally cannot have this much fun with your clothes on.

  

Most of us get involved in hobbies for simple reasons.  The subject interests us.  They’re fun.  They conjure up good childhood memories.  Or as is the case with the Pro-X system by Carrera, they allow us to enjoy a little good-natured but maniacal demolition and mayhem with our friends.

 

As we all know, meeting expectations is crucial to customer satisfaction, whether you’re buying a new car, having a meal at a restaurant, or fiddling with the stub axles on your latest Fly purchase.  Prior to my weekend with the Pro-X, expectations ran from phrases like ‘great potential’ to ‘damaged cars’ to ‘no replacement for analog’ to ‘hobby within a hobby’.  After a weekend with the Pro-X, I can safely say that all expectations were met, much the way a linebacker ‘meets’ a quarterback, or a wrecking ball ‘meets’ a building.  Nothing could have prepared me for the intense racing and subsequent carnage, or the tremendous amount of fun that was in store.  It was so intense that I developed a new medical condition that I’ve come to call the “Pro-X Claw”.  My hand was crushing the controller for hours on end until I could barely unwrap my fingers.

 

The first expectation shattered by the Pro-X system was the expectation that the only physical change was going to be the addition of a chip to an existing car. Making the cars digital would have been enough for most manufacturers, but not Carrera.  They introduced a brilliant new magnet and guide system in which the magnet is attached to the guide, and sprung laterally.  What’s this mean for you?  When your car slides in a corner, your magnet stays aligned with the rails, eliminating the unrealistic and sudden derailment of cars with magnetic downforce.  Brilliant!  Unfortunately, the big changes in the guide and magnet system mean that modifying one of your current Carrera cars for digital racing may be more of a chore than you’re willing to take on.  Regardless, you may also find out for yourself that the devastation possible with this kind of system will encourage you to keep your prized cars away from digital tracks, anyway.

 

After multiple discussions on various message boards, it seemed clear that there was a broad expectation that cars would be repeatedly damaged, and that the inability to protect nicely-detailed cars would prevent slot enthusiasts from converting their collections to digital.  Absolutely correct!  With truly remarkable toughening of the Carrera Superbird's, they only took superficial damage – mostly wings and paint.  But how these warriors got off the canvas time and again is a mystery to me.  Could it be the move to less brittle plastic?  Could it be the slight redesign of the smaller, more breakable parts for greater durability?  Possibly.  Carrera has taken what’s been known (and largely ignored) about their cars, and turned it into a significant advantage for digital racing:  they’re tough as nails.  We saw bone-jarring hits that would have reduced most slot cars to bits of high-velocity plastic shrapnel.  We saw repeatedly that sometimes the fastest way around the track was either under or through the opposition.  But short of occasionally needing to pop the front bushings back into place, these cars showed resilience unmatched by any slot manufacturer.  Crushing collisions where the drivers thought “OK, I’m sure we broke it now, so I suppose the fun’s over” turned into sheer amazement when a quick braid realignment was the only required fix, or putting the front bushings back in place.

 

I spent several hours over two days on this little two-lane oval with the Carrera Superbird's, and simply couldn’t get enough -- and I’m not even an oval racer.  The first day on the oval was raw carnage, but by day two, hints of real strategy were coming out.  Fastest car did NOT mean fastest driver, and with one or more ‘ghost’ cars on the track, timing your lane switches and paying attention to all drivers on the track were crucial elements to going fast.  Sometimes half-throttle on the straights led to getting around the quickest.  Sometimes shoveling the nose of your car under the tail of the ‘ghost’ car got you to the cross-over first.  And winning with a slower car was possible, even if your faster opponents never came out of the slot.  Sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it, being able to race and win with slower machinery?  This is an intangible quality unmatched by analog slot racing.  Also, if you move the two cross-over pieces even a little bit, you very significantly change the racing experience, even on an oval.  A decent-sized road course would practically have infinite variety, depending on the cross-over locations.  This variety adds a lot of value to small digital race sets.  A small analog oval could get boring in a hurry – three, maybe four minutes – your time may vary.  But on the digital oval, about four hours of driving and I was barely scratching the surface of all the possibilities, and most of that time I was laughing like a little kid sugared up on three bowls of Crunch Berries.

 

Changes to our hobbies can be met with great skepticism, and the dose of skepticism heaped on digital slot car racing could bring down a rhinoceros.  Carrera’s Pro-X shrugs off that tranquilizing dose like it was Kool-Aid, meeting or exceeding all expectations for this new breed of racing.  Now I won’t suggest that you lose your skepticism just because you’ve read a positive article about digital racing.  In fact, I recommend that you maintain your skepticism until you’ve tried it for yourself.  But if you need more skepticism, go ahead and use mine – I won’t be needing it any more.  By all appearances, analog slot racing is safe from the hordes of digital barbarians raging at the gates.  No one in their right mind will take a beautiful Fly Ferrari Coda Lunga and subject it to such potential brutality by converting it to digital.  But I took an opportunity to watch the other guys who tried it, and listen to the comments after.  The message rang like a bell – these guys love their analog slot racing, and digital won’t replace it.  But they communicated a rabid determination to find the money and the space to expand their hobby to include both.  If you saw the wide eyes and the half-crazed grins on their faces, you’d know exactly what I mean. 

  

Thanks to Harry at HomeRacingWorld for giving me and the rest of the guys the chance to try to Carrera Pro-X digital system during the Labor Day Shootout.  If I’ve offended you in this little article, welcome to the club – feel free to e-mail me at kmoser@thepoint.net.  If I didn’t offend you, let me know and I’ll try harder next time.

 

-Kurt