Hot Wheels racing in Canberra ?

photo from this post on the Austin Diecast Drags

Is anyone in Canberra interested in racing their Hot Wheels cars ? 


See this site Redline Derby Racing for info and ideas on racing tiny cars down a plastic track at low to moderate speeds. 


I would like to form a Canberra based league - meeting semi-regularly, to race Hot Wheels and other small diecast cars down plastic tracks. 


I'm thinking several different classes:

• standard and modified Hot Wheels cars
• Matchbox cars
• vintage Superfast/Majorette/Corgi 

Cars would be raced Round Robin style. I might even throw in some prizes for winners. This would be a good way to get kids involved in diecast collecting as well as having fun. 




Email me or leave a comment here with contact details and I will organise a competition.

Summernats burnout pad

Summernats is Canberras premier custom car show, held  every year in the first week of january. (See my other blog On Four Wheels for more Summernats goodness). This year I noticed a clever piece of merchandise - which I snapped up. A mousemat disguised as The Summernats Burnout pad! 

The real burnout pad is a marvel to watch - massively overpowered cars spin their tyres from one end of the track to the burnout pad, then start circling and pirouetting - generating massive clouds of smoke - until the tyres or engine blow. A double tyre blow is particularly prized. Clouds of tyre smoke waft over the crowd... This post captures one trip down the burnout pad. 

Here we have Ernie emulating a burnout...

Sadly no tyres blown...

Golden Wheels M.A.N. BP Tanker

On my way back from Melbourne late last year I stopped for LP Gas at a BP service station on the Hume Highway, and spotted this Matchbox Convoy sized diecast promotional model. It cost around nine dollars, from memory. It is a Golden Wheels model, with a diecast cab and tanker chassis, but the rest is plastic. 

 Well packed for transportation and display instore

 The truck is apparently a MAN TGA XXL. I guess Golden Wheels have de-detailed it just enough to escape licencing it.

 It is surprisingly detailed for a promotional model, with a little ladder, warning signs and a detailed tanker

 Very little detail on the base - i'm not sure what scale this model is

 This is toy like - no detail at all

 Golden Wheels BP Tanker 2011 vs Matchbox BP tanker circa 1980's

I'm not a great collector of model trucks, but I do have a subset of petrol tankers, so I purchased it based on that alone. The quality is toylike and there is little detail - apart from on the tanker. The cab could be any generic truck, and there are no diesel tanks or a bull bar, or any detail like headlights picked out. The price was similar to what one pays for a Matchbox Real Working Rig, but the quality is definitely not there. It's not a bad looking model, but it lacks that 'X' factor.

To the rating:

Golden Wheels BP petrol tanker 

Quality  5

Design    6

Colours   6

X-factor  5

Rating: 21/40

Low end diecast - XA Falcon and Charger ? Sadly not...

As a person who looks high and low for diecast cars to fit into the collection I often come across what I like to term 'low end diecast'. recently while in Melbourne i ventured into a likely looking 'dollar' shop and saw an XA falcon and a Valiant Charger! SCORE upon closer inspection, sadly not. None of the low end diecast cars remotely resembled the two Aussie cars - or any of the classic iron on the blister! 

See also: 

Motormax mutated Holden Ute
Hot Wheels Ford Falcon FG V8 Supercar
Revolution Models Holden Torana GTR-X in white

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