I walked into a hobby shop and they had a W/T Bowtie in the showcase.
So I bought it... ;)

Scott

Same thing happened to me with the BTB. I only bought it because it was regular price and I don't have that car already. The whole "chase car" thing is really dealing with a little subculture that exists in the hobby. I think that it would be far more productive for JL/RC2 to come up with special marketing promotions that aim to increase the overall appeal of the product to all hobbyists and come up with ways attract new ones rather than appealing to the hardcore collectors in search of the elusive "whites." If you want to see what happens when the main focus of the hobby is reduced to searching for these little chase cars take a look at the HT JL diecast board. Talk about dull reading.

I'd rather see JL spend their "white thunder" money on racing promotions like Aurora did instead of making one-off limited production collectables that primarily serve to grease the E-Bay skids more than anything else. I find it rather silly that the 40+ year old TJets from long dead and buried Aurora still have near exclusivity in pancake car racing with zero corporate support behind them. JL is alive and kicking and totally ignoring the opportunity to drive the racing market. Just my opinion.

Same thing happened to me with the BTB. I only bought it because it was regular price and I don't have that car already. The whole "chase car" thing is really dealing with a little subculture that exists in the hobby. I think that it would be far more productive for JL/RC2 to come up with special marketing promotions that aim to increase the overall appeal of the product to all hobbyists and come up with ways attract new ones rather than appealing to the hardcore collectors in search of the elusive "whites." If you want to see what happens when the main focus of the hobby is reduced to searching for these little chase cars take a look at the HT JL diecast board. Talk about dull reading.

I'd rather see JL spend their "white thunder" money on racing promotions like Aurora did instead of making one-off limited production collectables that primarily serve to grease the E-Bay skids more than anything else. I find it rather silly that the 40+ year old TJets from long dead and buried Aurora still have near exclusivity in pancake car racing with zero corporate support behind them. JL is alive and kicking and totally ignoring the opportunity to drive the racing market. Just my opinion.

yawn.... Exactly how much do you think RC2/JL spends on White Thunders? You make it sound like half the slot budget goes to satify the 'fringe collectors' and ebay 'skid greasers'... There MIGHT be a separate setup charge by the factory for WT's for different color paint and Tampos, but the price increase is small, if it even exists at all.

I wish they would just drop the white thunder thing altogether and just sell white rims and white tires. and in the bowtie brigade for example....do the impala in white and just drop the chevelle. and in the mopar muscle....please, somebody break the mold for that pickup truck already, and paint the yellow/black cuda a different color, i have about 12 of the pullbacks in that color already.....would have looked good black with yellow decals.

yawn.... Exactly how much do you think RC2/JL spends on White Thunders?

Lenny, I really appreciated your response. No, I don't think RC2/JL is spending a lot of production money on the white thunder cars. I see WT as a promotional program that helps drives sales by getting hard core collectors all pumped up about the releases. It's no doubt that JL also sees this as a way to appeal to the hard core collectors, which they highly value. That's a good thing. What I stated in my opinion was that I'd like to see them spend some of their promotional budget on racing related promotions to increase the penetration of the JL products into the racing programs. It seems rather odd to me that JL is probably the current largest volume producer of slot cars but very few national racing groups run complete JL cars as a class. There was talk of JL emulating the Aurora-Ford race program where Ford gave away a real car on national TV after a national qualification program that also involved popular race drivers of the day. It's just a part of the hobby that JL is ignoring. The related benefit to having a racing focus that I would see is that to be viable in racing circles the JL cars would have to maintain a higher standard when it comes to their cars running ability. This would hopefully improve the out of box quality of the chassis, which have appeared at times to have been somewhat of an afterthought.

Bottom line is that RC2/JL runs their own ship and they'll decide what works for them and what's worth investing in. As long as the products keep selling under the current marketing approach they won't change a thing. We can all voice our opinions about what we'd like to see them do to broaden their product's appeal to what matters to us. As stated in my previous post, it is my opinion that RC2/JL is leaving money on the table that's being gobbled up by products from a company (Aurora) that doesn't even exist.