The Avant Slot Audi R10 is an important model of a notable real racing car... let's get down to business.
This model is superb. The body contours, painting, and printing are on a par with the best slot cars...regardless of price. To date this is the best representation of the real Audi, and with a very crowded field of releases of this car, I feel confident that there probably won't be a more pleasing, more well detailed Audi R10 released this year.
This is just a guess but I think well see the chassis used on another body because it has the look of a universal chassis and really looks like a chassis that Avant Slot will be able to use on most any of this genre of racer. The body alone weighs 16g, the chassis weighs 66g for a total of 82 grams.
Motor wires need to be tucked to each side of the front of the motor so that the wires don't hit the underside of the interior.
Avant Slot gets high marks from me for putting the small screws in the car that hold the motor in the pod!
With a few parade laps to get the initial feel of the car we notice that the stock tires aren't flat on the wheels. They run on the center of the tire and on a ridge along the edge of the tire. First we'll use the stock tires then we will go to Slot It S2's, which fit similarly to the stock tires.
Testing starts on the East New York Raceway, routed wood track.
Testing notes are:
Loose body.
Front screw tight rear screw loose.
The car does sound smooth but does have some obvious gear noise.
With stock tires a we got a 5.523 lap.
We tried to true the tires but one of the push on plastic wheels was spinning freely on the axle. There is no knurling on the polished, smooth axles. For the purposes of testing we tried replace the wheels with SCX Pro wheels from the rear of the R8 Pro Audi. But those wheels and the Slot It tires were too large to be used on the Avant Slot car because the holes for the wheels would have made the fit a bit too tight. And the hub was too wide to allow the wheels to fit under the body. So we went back to the drawing board and used Permatex Threadlocker on the stock plastic wheels to glue them onto the axles.
Testing resumes with these notes:
It's quickly apparent that the car needs lots of tuning.
Not nearly as smooth as we think it should be.
Pod motion is too sticky.
The pod clearances feel too tight as it is in stock form..
Wheels now glued on the car dropped to 5.091 fastest lap, with consistant 5.15's.
We looked at the spring set up of the pod and the springs. There are two long leaf springs sandwiched together on each side of the pod. So you can set the spring tension by not only adjusting the set screws further forward or aft but also the amount of tension but using both or one of the springs. It's amazing the amount of adjustment on this car, the more you look the more you find.
Now with one spring engaged on each side we go back to testing. Body screws tightened up on the rear so the springs now doing the body roll. Testing had to stop because the crown gear split off the hub....
We only got to do about 40 timed laps after we adjusted the chassis. Before chassis adjustment started we got maybe another 40 laps in. There seems to be a lot of potential in the car, but for all the work on the chassis the plastic wheels and gear made the testing difficult.
The fastest lap we got was with very minimal tuning done to the car. With the problems fixed and further tuning we'd expect this car would be in the good company with Spirit and Slot It type cars.
Avant Slot is a new company and is newly distributed by Kimrey Enterprises here in the US market. Normally I don't note the distribution of slot cars in the body of the review but Cal's service is exceptional and attention to concerns but customers (both retailers and hobbiest buyers, and reviewers BTW as well).
