I was just curious if anybody can share any recollections of driving one of Aurora's Super IIs?

When these cars came out they were a little too rich for me and my buddies budgets....but they sure left an impression!

Were they as good a car as the hype conveyed? Would a Super II hold its own against an AFX Magnatration car?

Just curious. Thanks!

Jim Norton
Huntsville, Alabama

I had a new one as a child, It looked more impressive than it was. However I did not have a seperate power supply on each lane, if I did it would have done a lot better. The sponge tires with a little oil worked pretty well. With the quad lam you really need a lot of avail. current because of the low ohms. I would bet on a dc battery it was a monster.
I loved the tilt up body.

I still have the same one I got for Christmas the first year they came out. At the time I had a 4x8 four lane MM road course and a 3x16 two lane banked oval that also served as a drag strip. I had separate power supplies for each lane, the old style hummers, not wall warts. The Super II was not very impressive out of the box. Putting on some silicone tires and stock pickups helped, but all those lead weights were a load to haul around. I'd imagine that on a big commercial track it would come alive but on a relatively small home set it was a just a cool looking novelty item in a pimped out shiny box. The TycoPros were faster on the oval and the Riggens and AFX cars with hot arms were faster on the road course. Still, the Super II has a unique place in premagnetotractonian age slot car history. I consider the Super II the ultimate factory produced TJet architecture based HO slot car.

I never owned a magnetraction as a kid so we never raced Super IIs against them. I guess I could break out the old lead sled and do some comparisons. My expectation is that the magnetraction would be faster.

I remember racing a Super back in 1972 in Salem Indiana.. I was one of the first ones in our club here in Louisville Ky. to buy one . Our local hobby shop got in two of them & I just HAD to have one. That summer in June, Steve Zink, a local Pro & rewinder supreme posted a 12 hour enduro race he was hosting in Car Model Magazine. His track was HUGE, with trains & lights & banked turns. And about a 20 foot straight away. The top 4 qualifiers got to run the total 12 hours each driver. I envisioned all kinds of things going wrong, but all that I changed on my Super was pickups and brushes. I changed a few parts to get in the show such as pickup shoes (the stock ones with braid were useless), front end (stock AFX with O-rings), silicone slip-ons with AFX wheels & axle, & of course the body. I ran a Thayer Porsche 917 coupe( which won concours). ,All 3 of the other cars were modified AFXs with rewinds. My 'lil Super ran over 1900 laps with only oil added, one brush change, & several pickup swaps. The Qaudralam stayed cool because I sanded down the brushes to half the size on both sets, to free the car up a little. I finished 2nd behind Steve who won by 2 hundred laps +. But I finished about 150 a head of 3rd place. 12 hours on such a LONG track was tough. We all took breaks to hit the bathroom & eat & such. It was great fun. I still remember that race as one of my favorites. I still have the Super & the beat up body I raced, although I changed the chassis a bit. In my opinion, the Super 2 was a great car that needed a little TLC to run with the big dogs....Those "were" the days............Tom

Great stories - My neighbor got one when we were growing up. He was the type that had to put everything in its place all of the time. Naturally, he didn't want to trade paint on the road courses for fear of damage to his prize. So I never really got to see one run. But I am glad to hear the stories and learn a new vocabulary "premagnetotractonian age" - LOL
Jim

Pre-magnon! LOL

Sadly my super ll went the way of the dinosaur when mom cleaned house after I moved away from home.

Our local track was a rather twisty affair with the emphasis in driver skill and handling...really a t-jet track in the AFX age. My experiences reflect many of the above comments ...kind of a sluggish big track car given all the pig iron it was hauling around. The poor thing needed the quad to haul the extra car it had in the trunk.

The braids didnt do much and if anything created more problems than they were worth. As Ogarfield stated the standard AFX front with O-rings with standard shoes worked better... lower and lighter!

Honestly I get a kick out of all the hyperbole then and still surrounding the Super ll and remember thinking that my properly set up, blue bowtied z-28 with the holy grail arm, used to kick my Super ll's butt. Naturally this came after the fact because I just hadda have a Super ll. Given the huge excitement and major performance jump when the AFX first came out the Super ll had some pretty big shoes to fill. While it was fancy cool to look at there's a darn good reason that there were many of them left near mint in box. LOL. I always felt they fell just short of the promise and recall that it was one of the few times I felt gyped in a slotcar purchase.

The so called "Wild Ones" (Translated: Crappy rear foams fly "Wildly" off in the turns) didnt seem so bad, nor did the not so tough Tuff Ones, with their genetic predisposition for a "Quest for Fire"; seem all so bad either.

In all fairness Suzie Q was looking darn fine in a halter and daisy dukes that summer so like the dummy I already was, I again went for the shiny package and a mere promise of performance. ;) It was the summer I tuned in and dropped out of slots and began playing with other slots. I now assess all blame on the Super ll.

If I still had my Super ll today I'd sell it in a minute. Wish I still had that particular Z-28! :thumbsup:

I have one, but not an original, this one was built by Alan Ginko with all original parts.
It runs well, but like reported here... not overly impressive.

The quadralam found its way into a number of my regular A/FX chassis and it definitely delivered a very smooth "big block" feel to the A/FX platform when it wasn't bogged down by the weights. The quadralam arm was a thoroughly superb piece of engineering. Had Aurora done a $6.00 (at a time when A/FX cars were $4.00) version of the A/FX with the quad and gearset from the Super II they would have sold like hotcakes. That would be a true muscle car version of the stock A/FX.

I also was overly impressed by the packaging and promise of high performance, had to have it!! I remember it handled like a tank on a home track, never ran it on a commercial,,, the pickups were useless ,, so they were replaced with stock shoes bent and twisted for optimum contact, that helped.. Not being a CanAm fan, the flip body disappeared to the bottom of the slot box and the chassis wound up under a 55 chevy, later.. it all was dismantled, the arm and magnets wound up in a tjet under a mustang.. made one heck of wild drag car.. Like others it got tossed out when the now ex wife and I went separate directions.. Some how, I managed to keep the mustang,,,body and the front body mount to the super II it lives in a parts box.
Chris

Shortly after the Super appeared, the Magnatraction took hold as THE car to race in pro competition. With all the pros racing the AFX with brass bottom cars, the Super still fell short. That Qaud was the hottest factory arm you could buy for your modified AFXs, but the handwriting was on the wall when the magnets got lower & bigger in the Magnatraction cars. I saw some wicked running AFXs trying to run with the Magnatractions back then. Only one innovative young man named Randy Kemp of K&K fame pulled off the nearly imposible feat in one of the newly formed HOPRA races in Indiana. Randys AFX featured a shaved down AFX chassis so cut down, that the brush holders were covered with strips of brass to the point of being "melted" in place. His tires were unbelievably tiny , front & back. I think he used a Tycopro hop-up rear gear. The car utilized a phospherous bronze wiper pickup system, & here's the real killer....Blue & yellow Super II MAGNETS that were a lot stronger than the Magnatraction magnets. Since the car was so low after the chassis was shaved, the strong Super magnets, really helped the car handle. I was best friends with Randy, and I can safely say that he was one of the GREATS in HO as a driver & inventor..........Tom

Lived in mid-North Indiana. Had a 4 x 8 two lane Aurora/AFX track. Several friends had similare set ups. One had his on a ping pong table so that was 5 x 10 (?). Had to have a Super II. We were all running AFXs with super II mags from the AFX Hop Up kit and the AJs or AW (forget which) AFX brass "pan" that hooked into the body mounts on the side and looked like a horse shoe from the top. All had AJs or AW silcones on either AFX or metal wheels (080 thread ons). The Super II was a slug on these tracks and against these cars. It had too much weight and the gearing was too tall for these home tracks. I wonder what it would do on a 4 x 16 or 4 x 20 layout. Never found out.

Like all of my other cars, this one "disappeared" when I went to college. There must have been some kind of South American Slot Car Death Squad at work back then. Must of us were affected... :drunk: :hat: :freak: :dude:

The review of the Super II in Car Model magazine said it was FANTASTIC! I ordered one from Auto World as soon as I knew they were available, I usually did NOT have the sort of funds it would take to get such a pricey slot car but I received an Auto World voucher which would cover about half the cost of the car. I must have gotten one of the first cars - it wa beautiful! When I put it on the track all it did was spin the rear tires - HUGE disappointment! I tried silicones and even that didn't help, I think I got about three laps at a rather modest pace, a good AFX or TycoPro would hve just killed it on my large Aurora lock and joiner track. I thought it had very good electrical contact with the braid on the pick-ups. To me it seemed like there was too much weight in the front and almost no traction. I figured this car needed some major re-engineering to rebalance power, traction and weight. I wanted to strip the weights off and get a Shadow body for it but that never happened. I put it back in it's pretty box with the original receipt and I still have it today. I always wanted to make a "runner" Super II to see what it should have been like.

i picked up a Clone on the 'bay and noticed the same thing. There were lots of wheel spin and it didn't handle the turns with the amount of torque in the rear. Did anyone ditch any of the weights? get a different gear?

I do plan on buying more of the super II wheels and tire combos for my other AFX/non mags. I have a few Tycopros to practice against.

From what I recall the Car Model review of the Super II was not glowing at all. The braid-on-shoe design was lambasted as was abysmal breaking performance, due in part to the magnetic rear axle and heavy motor magnets.

Here yo go fellas:

http://horacepro.com/super2_1.html

Mike

:wave:.... thanks Mike. Very interesting. nd

Here yo go fellas:

http://horacepro.com/super2_1.html

Mike

Thanks for the link back to 1973, Mike. I had forgotten how scientific Ed's reviews were. The result is a very indepth article. Thanks to Ed for keeping this treasure available to old and new slot heads. :)

Ed always did great reviews applying the scientific method. I think he was an engineering student at the time so he understood the value in presenting the data in an objective manner and using comparative data from other cars. Anyone looking to do a decent product review would be well served to look at any of Ed's fine Car Model reviews.

I'd forgotten many of the details of his Super II review and keyed in too closely on the negative aspects of the review, probably because they were the same characteristics that plagued me with the Super II on my shorter track at the time. The true measure of the Super II's success, or lack of it, was its rather brief lifetime and use as a parts donor. I'd be curious to see what the production numbers for the Super II look like.

The very positive review in Car Model magazine was not the test review in this link but was from the new product intro (probably at the New York Toy Fair) when the then new AFX track was also introdcued with the Lola T-260 and Shadow Can Am cars. The article said the demo car at the NY Toy Fair was fantastic! Great handling and good power and they said ist was probably as good as any "pro" car.