what doe severyone think of tcr

Allways wanted a set...never got one...

Great concept.....but never really worked as well as the commercials showed it working!

The best slotless chassis we found was the old Aurora Speedsteer chassis, and that is what Tyco copied a few years back and called Total Control Racing (TCR). We always jokingly called it Total Crap......Really.

Majorette still markets a version of the original Ideal TCR in Europe.

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www.SlotCarJohnnies.com

How well/poorly did the Speedsteer chassis work?

I've been tempted by a few of the different slotless sets I've seen on eBay (mostly the Accelerators), but no one on the boards has ever had anything good to say about 'em.

It's a nice concept, but because of how the track and pickup system, you can only have 2 racers. The track has 3 rails per lane......One was the 'power' rail, 1 to one cotroller and 1 to the other controller. Had the track been made with 4 rails per lane, you could have 4 racers, which would be much more fun.....

Someone came up to me at the last Parsippnay show looking for TCR chassis. It was the first time I'd ever had anyone ask me for them. He said he loved them and raced them a lot. He explained that the biggest thing to get them running well is to supply them with more power than you get from a single wall wart. The extra power made the cars run better when it came to changing lanes.

I have converted some of my TCR chassis to slotted by simply glueing the front wheels straight and glueing a small nail into the front. The pickup shoes need a little bending to get them to work just right, but then the chassis are pretty cool. They will tend to slide around somewhat like an HP-7, although you will get some with stronger traction magnets. Consider them magnet-lite.

A couple nice things about them:

(1) The pickup shoe springs are real tiny and not very strong; therefore the pickup shoes don't have a lot of up/down travel to them, so they don't bang on track joints as much as other chassis. They are actually pretty quiet.

(2) The narrow TCR chassis fit under some types of Indy/F1 bodies. The front part of the TCR chassis sits right under the front wing, which may very well protect that fragile piece of the body during crashes.

(3) Not every Tyco body can take a TCR chassis. For example, there are actually differences in Lamborghini bodies designed to use the TCR chassis as opposed to those which use a regular narrow pan. Only certain Indy/F1 body styles can use a TCR. While cars which use a TCR can use a regular chassis, the opposite is not always true.

(4) They will run in either direction without changing the rear axle.

Thanks...Joe

I have some TCR stuff and the extra power thing is true. The "Tyco" TCR stuff needs the extra power because you lose power when you change lanes. Close racing results in a crash if you try to change lanes just in front of the other car. I used the extra power on a Tyco Banked track. It was kind of fun, but the "Ideal" TCR actually worked better. The only modification was using silicon rear tires. The "Ideal" TCR uses the the torque of the rear tire to keep it in the lane. Example, to stay in the left lane, the right rear tire has power, and opposite for the right lane. The "Ideal" TCR chassis also coast, which makes it much easier to change lanes at speed, and makes for better racing. If the TycoTCR loses contact, you're dead in the water, right there. If the IdealTCR loses contact, you just roll on down the track til you have contact. The Ideal track is okay, no center walls in the turns. The Tyco track has the option of a center wall in the turn or not, and you can get the banked turns. If you have extra power with the Tyco controllers, they won't work right.

In short, the best combo is Tyco Track - Ideal Cars(with silicon rears)

Rich