Home Racing World

Okay, I know there are haters out there, and I can take it. I am having a blast with old Womps. They're simple, fast, and cheap. Here are some favorites that I'm in the midst of restoring. The blue Vega ran a bunch of laps with all it's original parts until he rear gear cracked (it was the original Weldum gear). That's the only part that has been replaced. The tires were restored with running them on my truer for a few minutes, and then rubbing high spf suntan lotion into them.

Oh, I remember the running them as kit cars in the 80's. They were indestructible and to have a new car required a new body and off you go!

I like them myself. A bit out of scale but tremendous amounts of fun. They can be made to handle very good with a little work. :)

That's my favorite thing for commercial raceways. There aren't any around here that I care to travel to, but I still keep a couple of legends around.

One year we took the chassis and mounted scratchbuilt styrene late model bodies on them. Racing them on ovals was pretty neat. The chassis took the beating better than the bodies did!

Patrick

fantastic cars you have!

Thanks, they are a bunch of fun. We race Womps almost exclusively on a flat 6 lane oval track.

Womp racing . . . . . ????

I know there are some folks out there that question why a person would like to race a womp.

However I've raced them many times. Some of the most intense racing of Womps I've participated in was at The Raceway in Cocoa, Florida, now relocated to Melbourne, Florida.

They have a 56 foot per lap "Phoenix" track built by Steve Ogilvie and the rules were very strict. The cars were so close in performance that passing on the oval was a real challenge and the results were always hotly contested. I thought it was some outstanding low dollar racing and we had 25 entries one night. It was some outstanding races.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Marty. That lane length may be the key. Our average length is around 55 feet. That, combined with zero banking, takes away the horsepower aspect. However fast you are, you only get 12 feet of straight before the flat turn. Braking is our most critical element. We've had many heats in our restricted divisions where 3 or 4 racers had the same lap total for the heat. We've actually had races decided by a fender length. We started racing the Womps because we really didn't have room for a good 1/24th track. Now, we've become fans of these little monsters. One car at our track is still running with its original parts from three years ago, and winning races. It's a terrible business model. The car has needed two pairs of tires and some braids over those three years.

I really enjoyed the Womps on commercial tracks as well.
For home use they are a bit too fast, and the sponge tires don't work on plastic.

I have some of the photo paper Whelen Modifieds on a wompish steel chassis from Reality Raceway here. They are a lot of fun. I use Colgate Motion FF180 toothbrush motors to tone them down a bit for my wood oval. I don't like to use greasy additives for traction so I use WD40 on the sponges for traction. It's good enough for a 5-6 lap dash but the hook up goes away quickly after that.

I spent a lot of time racing Womps at a commercial track back in the 80's. Sometimes a guy would be having a bad day and resort to trying to hit the Coke machine against the back wall with his car by not letting up around the big banked corner at that end of the track. With a Womp you could do that, pick it up off the floor and go right on racing.

Then we outgrew that odd proportions and began cutting up the chassis to make them longer and narrower to go with more realistic bodies. We even added drop arms to the guide tongue which seemed to make a difference with handling. Give me a Womp type chassis, with a Dremel and a soldering gun and in no time at all I'll have a heck of a reliable 'scratch built' chassis for any type of slot car body.

Slothead