What models are best for non-customized racing?
I wanna get a few cars for downhill racing that are extremely fast. There are a few FTE cars that I might purchase, such as the Cadillac Escalade FTE.
Other cars like Tail Dragger or Dodge Challenger funny car have a lot of weight on them, but I've not experimented with downhill racing.
Discussion
Here is a link to the list of car rankings back when Brian used to run the fantasy league.
It lists the match ups for each car and who they beat and lost to.
There are FTE's listed on there.
http://archive.redlinederby.com/fantasy/car-rankings.php
For me the Holy grail of cars are the Ferrari testarossa and F40.
I actually let an F40 slip by me at a yard sale because I didn't want to pay $2 for it.
This was about a month before I knew about the downhill racing community.
As Will posted, the Fantasy League is a good gauge but that rankings list stopped getting updated around 2014, so there aren't any real new castings in that list.
In general, however, I always scope out Ferraris, funny cars and anything that's a metal body with metal chassis and normal, plastic wheels - nothing rubber or whatever - so generally cars pre-200, the earlier the better.
The Hot Ones and Cool Ones you can still find in the stores and they're generally metal/metal but they're usually in the $3 price range.
So cars I'd consider purchasing/looking for:
- FTE cadillac escalade, or other cars with FTE wheels
- Ferrari castings, preferably heavier models with good spinning wheels
- Dodge Challenger funny car
- maybe my Greyhound bus due to its super heavy casting and still good spinning wheels.
This is the results page for the Lincoln Johnny Lightning Race Club; looking through the winners (especially the Lightning Fast 1 and 2 winners, Any Brand winners, Johnny Lightning Stock winners, Hot Wheels Stock winners, Fastest of Class winners, and Fastest Car of the Year winners) might help you to get an idea of what some of the faster cars are (keeping in mind that LF 1, our fastest class, is entirely JL '69 BWF Camaros, and that there's the occasional rarely-fast car like my teal Fat Fendered Forty or Zach's Mr. Green Dodge Viper [though it hasn't won since 2013]):http://www.ljlrc.com/category/results/
Also take a look at their Facebook pages, especially "LJLRC Racing" and "Lincoln Johnny Lightning Race Club."
I wrote a post not long ago about 5 of my favorite fast stock Hot Wheels cars. You can read it here.
http://www.racehotwheels.com/2016/02/five-fast-hot-wheels-cars-that-you-need.html
They are the Ferrari F40, Probe Funny Car, Way 2 Fast FTE, Cadillac V16 FTE, and the Kenny Bernstein Funny Car.
As FOTF mentioned, the JL '69 BWF Camaros are very fast, but expensive and a little hard to come by.
Ferrari F40, red with gold wheels, was the car I used for the C4 stock race this month and it's as fast as a modified car. It won the tournament with flying colors.
- I use the scientific method, Eney meeny miney mo. Which would maybe explain my record. — Nightstalker
- hey stawka... good to see the grim reaper didn't get you ! — fordman
- Busy boy, started a car club here in Jersey — Nightstalker
I have purchased the Kenny Bernstein car, a V16 FTE, and a Cadillac Escalade FTE over the past 6 months. Ghost Jerker did a "King of the Hill" (fastest stock model competition) & the Bernstein lost to the Batman vs Superman police patrol car on one of the races. Surprising since the Bernstein is reportedly one of the faster hot wheel models, so my guess is the track had some influence to it.
I've purchased a bunch of vehicles this past year, but I still have yet to find or construct a good track to race them.
You should check out Ghostjerker on Youtube.
He and his kids do these races called "King of the Hill" where they open up a bunch of cars and race them on the 6 lane race track. I think the current "King" is the funny car.
Its a pretty good channel, he also goes to flee markets a lot and digs around for cars. Its pretty fun to see what he can find.