Do you like big fat fenders? How about a slot car with a motor that's got torque enough for 4 normal slot cars? Well then the first Spirit Silhouette Peugeot may just be a car you should check out.
The Motul Peugeot is the first in what promises to be many more Peugeot 406 Silhouette's to come. The finish on the body, while a bit on the busy side livery-wise, is well done...but does not appear to have any clear coat on it.
The body's molded very thinly and fits perfectly over the chassis. I've checked every inch of this body and there's nothing ill fitting, nothing squeezed, nothing bent, nothing warped, it all fits. There is no snap fit here. Spirit are continuing to make bodies with hard core racers in mind...nice and thin!
The interior also is quite thin. And also it's a half-pan, which clears the motor/gears nicely. I'm very glad that Spirit have chosen NOT to go the super-detailed route with their cars with regard to the interiors. Also model of the car's motor (in the back window) is part of the back deck of the interior, and is not a separate piece.
The front axle mounts feature the set screw adjustment that has been seen before on Spirit releases. But when the car is on the track there is no upward play left to adjust out even with the set screws only threaded in place and not actually touching the axle.
The hugely powerful SX3 motor, without a wrapper again in this latest Peugeot, is mounted yet again as an angle winder. In front of it is a small bar magnet which, coupled with the open can motor, provide surprisingly little magnetic down force on my Carrera test track. With the stock tires in place you can EASILY spin the tires the entire way down the straight whenever you'd like to and the car doesn't pick up that much speed as a result of the extra throttle. The tires, as you might expect from that comment, don't stick terribly well on my plastic track.
The story was a bit different on the East New York Raceway test session for this 90 gram car recently. The stock tires stuck surprisingly well...odd I know. But when the stock tires were replaced with Ortmann's (which fit well enough even though there weren't designed to fit specifically for the Spirit car) made this car come alive. Times on this car dropped from around a 6 second lap to a 5.20 second lap on the 61 foot long track. This was with nothing done other than some lube and a few turns out of the screws on the motor pod.
There are no holes in the motor pod to screw down the long can motor. This motor seems to be the way most companies are going for their "serious racer" motor. On the recently released Spirit BMW 1600 there are holes to screw down the motor to make sure the tremendously powerful motor is held down securely in the pod. In this car, however there are no holes in the pod to screw down the motor. There is a great deal of flex in the pod and, personally, I'd like to see it braced a bit more. Having said that, there was no "high torque hop".
As it is this car is quite fast. We managed to get it going very fast without much (or really any) work. On this car everything is working the way it should right out of the box, the wheels are worth noting as being just as round as you could hope they'd be from...yes I'll say it...Scalextric. Ok, ok, before you say I'm falling off my chair with giddy excitement here by saying it's really race-ready (issues of magnetic down force aside for a minute)...well it is ready to race. Just like the quality you've come to expect from Scalextric and Slot It. Recently Spirit had some quality control issues with the BMW, they're not present on this copy of the car I have, I'm hoping that your experience with the Spirit Motul Peugeot is the same.
Dave Kennedy
Publisher, Slot Car News
