Review: Hot Wheels Track Builder Speed Box Starting Gate

EcuWeeEcosse Tuesday, 4/28/2020

So I recently picked up what I believe is a relatively new 4 lane start gate from Mattel, as part of the “Hot Wheels Track Builder Unlimited Multi-lane Speed Box”.  I thought I’d post a review. 

The set comes as a storage box with the start gate being the lid.  Inside are 4 bits of jazzy neon yellow and orange striped track, 4 bits of orange track, some connectors and some whirly chequered flag finish line things. The whirly flags are not interconnected, so they cannot act as a proper finish gate that will tell you which car won in a two or more lane close finish.  The box has mouldings on the bottom that allow you to connect track to it, so it could conceivably form part of an elevated track support structure.

The bit I was interested in was the lid, which is described on the packaging as a “fair-start gate”.  It is neon yellow plastic and has a beefy looking (although plastic of course) single clamp underneath.  The clamp is spring loaded (with a metal tension spring) and can extend to about 6cm in width.  When clamped on to a table edge the lid sits at a fairly steep angle. It has little triangular cut outs in the sides to help it stay on the table.  Overall I found it to be reasonably secure.  It clamps better on thicker tables than thin ones.

 

There are some nice touches such as moulded (semi-circular blue-style) connectors above and below the start gates (allowing you to add track above the gate to stack several cars for simultaneous release, or even have a larger track pass straight through the gate) and cut outs to store two cars before moving them into a gate.

 

The release lever is on one side.  You move it through about 90 degrees from upright to flat to release the cars.  The gates/pins themselves are an odd design, hollow at the rear (i.e. on the side facing away from the cars) and with two different angled surfaces at the front (facing the cars).  They fold down towards the cars, meaning that cars tend to be pushed backwards a little as the gate folds down before gravity takes over.  Moving the lever more slowly avoids this backwards push, but then the cars often tend to snag their wheels/undercarriages on the gates and crash.

I could live with that, but there is a more serious flaw.  The four gates and the lever are on a single blue plastic spindle that rotates when you move the lever.  The spindle is thin and about 12 inches long.  The problem is that, with the lever at one end, there seems to be some sort of slight torque twist in the plastic spindle, so that the gate nearest the lever always drops fractionally before the others. This means that the car out of Gate 1 will always have an advantage and, other things being equal, will invariably win any race.  Even kids will, I think, notice this Lane 1 advantage after a short while as you can clearly see the car leaving the line first. For what is supposed to be a “fair-start gate”, that is a fairly unforgivable design flaw.  I have tried spraying some silicone lubricant on the spindle and that improved things a little, but the problem persists.

On the plus side, the two gates farthest from the lever do seem to release at the same time, perhaps because the spindle is not twisting at that point. These two gates have given fairly even results over a number of runs, although I can't claim to have done extensive testing. It therefore does seem useable as a two lane gate.

I paid £20 (about $25 US dollars) for the set, which would be reasonable value if it worked successfully as a fair four-lane gate.  As it is, I can’t really recommend it, which is a shame.



Discussion

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GTRguy83 4/28/20

I have one, you just have to be careful about narrower cars, they hit the hole for the gate and stop or crash off track.


  • Do you notice the same thing with the lane nearest the lever releasing slightly ahead of the others? I'm (naively perhaps) so surprised that they would sign off a product with this basic flaw that I wonder if maybe I just got a duff one somehow? Can't see anything wrong though so it appears to be the basic design that's the issue. — EcuWeeEcosse
  • Yeah it seems to be slightly quicker. Before I picked up a super 6 lane I was only using the two lanes farthest from the lever. — GTRguy83
  • I think that's the answer, to treat it as a two lane gate only, and as that it is fine really, albeit you have two redundant lanes. — EcuWeeEcosse
  • Yeah, it's fairly cheap though so it's worth picking up if you need one asap — GTRguy83
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redlinederby 4/28/20
Site manager

Great review! Thanks for sharing. Nice to see Mattel at least trying with the start gate stuff but your review outlines what you'd probably expect - it's a cheap-yet-better-than-nothing type of thing. But hey, it's for the kids, right? 

Seems weird they would choose to have the release blocks push the cars back rather than dropping forward or even just straight down from the force of your push.

It is pretty clever to have that notch out for the table edge...little designs like that remind that they are really thinking about things. Nothing will be up to our standards but thinking of even that little notch is pretty great.

Given Hot Wheels has a whole collector side of the brand that targets older kids, they should branch out and have a racing brand as well. They could spend their money on worse, that's for sure.

Side note: I'll be adding some emphasis to your article to highlight some key stuff, just FYI.


  • I do think Mattel are trying. It's as if they have some proper car guys on their team now who are taking more inspiration from real car culture (drag tracks, drift sets etc). The Track Builder Unlimited range has potential and at least can be inter-connected, even if that inter-connection is often a token gesture. I still believe! — EcuWeeEcosse
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ghenty 4/29/20

Excellent review. Was seriously considering purchasing this but as I am totally in it for the racing I will give it a miss now.

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SpyDude 11/13/20

I got one of the sets - haven't really noticed any twisting issues, but am looking at building my own gate and figured this would suffice for the meantime.

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GT_Diecast 3/2/22

I also have one and never paid attention to frequency of the wins on lane one.

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