The Fly Racing Rally 911 is a car destined to be a heavily raced slot car, especially for club and proxy racing. The body is thinner than the regular production Fly 911's.
Fly has done a great job modeling this car. The body seems to be in great proportion and in this version Fly have chosen to do the "ducktail" car first for the Racing version. The overall quality of this car is very good. There is no flash on the body, the wheels are very nicely done. They're plastic BTW, even though Fly calls them Strontium...
The tires and wheels on my version were concentric, and everything you could want in your ready to run car. The Oz Racing type of wheels on this vintage car is odd and I'd prefer the Fuchs wheels, lace BBS style, or Mini-lights wheels on the regular production 911/934's.
I'm not sure if Fly has done this on other Racing versions but on this 911 they've made the wheels removable and the 2.5mm axles have a flat spot on the end so that if you remove the wheels, you can push them back on again and THEY STAY PUT! This is great and this is something that every company should do if they put plastic wheels on cars.
"But... Dave", you say, "why did you remove the wheels if they were so good?" Well, 2 reasons:
1. The front wheels stuck out of the body and tiny bit, but they also would hit the wheel arch while cornering and slowed the car down.
And 2. and most importantly.... look at what happened less than a dozen laps into testing...
The 27-tooth stock crown gear totally disintegrated! At least half the teeth on the gear just broke off...very disappointing. The teeth on the 9-tooth stock pinion were fine.
Back to the rest of the car...
The chassis has a spring loaded motor pod that's adjustable by screwing 2 screws on the sides. This adjusts ride height. The car is equipped with red springs.
If you flip the chassis over you can see the new Rally 18k motor. The box says this motor is 22,000 rpm at 14.8 volts, but the motor says 18,000 rpm at 14 volts...odd to say the least.
The NC style, short-can motor is held firmly in place by this bracket that covers the nose of the motor.
So since this is a Racing edition of the 911 you'd hope that the parts are suitably thin, thus saving as much weight as possible...well how's this for thin?
The interior is paper thin plastic. And is so thin you can see through it even without holding it up to a light as I've done here. The glass is vacuum formed and exceedingly well done too.
At first my car ran well and very quietly for a few "get to know you" quickie laps on my small wood track. I did maybe 10 laps before heading out to work one day. And then I took the car to the East New York Raceway for serious testing. I got to do only 5 timed laps before the gears let go. In preparation for this possibility I brought some Slot It gears with me. I replaced the whole rear running gear with a Slot It axle, wheels, and Ortmann tires. The stock "Type D" tires worked very, very well on my wood track, but in the very low humidity of the ENYR the only tires that work well enough to get low lap times are the Ortmann's. But on plastic track the stock tires would work well and shouldn't have to be replaced. Another feature this car comes with is a small wrench for changing the gears! I applaud Fly for providing this standard on this model.
The car is well balanced and can be thrown around the track with abandon. It's relatively slow turning motor is an excellent choice for this car. This car is an excellent starting place for a serious racer, but because of the need to replace the gears, I would not suggest this model for the novice racer or first time buyer.
Well, I'm very, very grateful that Fly sent this car for me to test... many tests require that you look at the car from a box stock perspective. This car, being a Racing version, should be held to a higher standard. Especially since the retail price of these cars is somewhat higher than the average slot car. Many things are very right with this car, but the gears have to be addressed in my opinion.
Some numbers:
Body weight stock=82 grams
Speed on ENYR:
Stock tires around 6.9 seconds
ProSlot rubber tires also around 6.9 seconds
Jel Claws tires (after around 300 laps, tires sticky) 5.513 seconds
Ortmann tires for Fly classic hubs 5.35 seconds
Testing notes:
-Needs a bit of weight up front to hold down the sprung guide.
DaveK
Publisher, Slot Car News
