It’s time for another Speed Inc Retro-Review. For those not familiar, when I can pick up a race set, accessory or slot car kit from the past, that is complete or nearly complete, I will run an article covering the product like I do new releases. Think of it as a brief trip back in time with a chance to look at some cool slot car stuff from the past. Today we have a new, unopened Mattel/Hot Wheels Electric Racing Monaco race set. This was one of the first sets that transitioned to the Mattel brand after they purchased Tyco in the late 90’s, thanks to the success of Tyco’s Dino-riders toys and the trend of every big company buying up other companies for their assets. I’ll give Mattel credit for keeping the HO slot car line alive for a while and having the clout to acquire the Formula 1 licensing, but I never thought Mattel had a grasp of the hobby world and eventually turned the slot car line into “just another toy”. As Tomy AFX and Life-Like grabbed a bigger chunk on the slot car market throughout the 2000’s, Mattel allowed the venerable Tyco chassis and the slot car line as whole to fade away. This race set is a great example of the Formula 1 licensing and details Mattel still placed in making a good product. So let’s break open the box and take a look at what’s inside.
Taking the tour around the outside of the box, we can see the eye-catching artwork on the front of the box and the buy me now tempting photos of the cars and track layout on the back and sides. The box folds up and has a carry handle so you can haul the track where ever you go. Notice the controllers on the back of the box are molded in black plastic and have the Tyco logos still in place. We’ll come back to that later in the article.
Inside the box we can see from the top picture, everything is packed up tight and didn’t move anywhere even after twenty plus years. All the track is packaged together and the two cars are securely taped to the insert in the box. The controllers, power pack and accessories are all packaged and ready to be set up.
The set includes the racing handbook with instructions on track assembly and car maintenance.
A card with track cleaning instructions was inserted with the terminal track section.
The last bit of documentation is the parts inventory sheet and the track layout.
A set of international flags are included to decorate the guardrails around the turns.
The power pack is a standard wall wart rated at 15 volts DC at .5 Amp.
The controllers are the same as the Tyco design, but the Tyco logos have been replaced with the Hot Wheels logo. The controllers rate at 70 ohms.
The track is a simple figure “8”. The track is the Quik-Clik style track, that was retooled to strengthen the connection tabs that hold the track together. The box art indicated the track layout being 1.2m x x.5m in length and width with a lap length of 2.6m. Interestingly the scale is identified as 1:87th.
Of course the stars of any race set are the cars and this set is no exception. The set contains very detailed versions of the Williams FW21 BMW powered F-1 and Jaguar R1 Ford Zetec-R powered F-1 from the 1999 Formula 1 racing season.
#95786 Williams FW21 BMW Formula 1 Race Car – White-Blue #10 Compaq
#96786 Jaguar R1 Ford Zetec-R Formula 1 Race Car – Green-White #7 HSBC/Jaguar
And we will wrap up the photos with a little racing action on the track.
The Mattel/Hot Wheels Electric Racing Monaco race set was a good beginners set. The cars alone were great representatives of the hobby and are very much sought after today by collectors. Mattel brought some great liveries to the HO slot racing world and I always thought they would still be top competitors in the hobby today if they had stuck with more of the racing themes and maybe addressed some of the hobby/collector audience for their product line. I wonder what a Mattel HPX2 chassis would look like today and if we would have seen modern F1 or Formula E racers come to the big box stores around the holiday time? That wraps up our Speed Inc Retro-Review. And as always, when I run across another treasure from the past, I’ll be sure to share with our readers and reminisce about the good old days of the slot car hobby.