| March 29 2004 Review |
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 Click Here To Buy This Item Now Ninco ProRace Subaru WRC New Zealand ’03 By Shawn Smith Click here to have Genie read this review out loud to you in Microsoft Agent AUDIO! [Click here to chat about this item on our Forum] Appearance:  Rally cars in general sure seem to be very popular don’t they? Including Ninco I can think of at least four other manufacturers that make their own renditions of rally type cars and I know of one other manufacturer looking to bring out their own in the months to come. So with all of the rally cars available what might make someone purchase a Ninco rally car over any other brand?  Well for starters this isn’t exactly you ‘run of the mill’ rally car. Ninco’s ProRace version might look like other Subaru’s out on the market however there are a few differences. If you can’t make out the list of items in the picture above they are; an NC-6 Crusher 23,500 rpm motor, hardened steel axles, metric screws, double transmission belts and ball bearing axle bushings.  Of course none of those things are really anything you could see by just looking at the outside of the Ninco ProRace Subaru. Instead, what we do see is an attractive semi-metallic blue paint job decorated in the well-known yellow swoosh and stars detail.  Sponsorship graphics are colorful and well placed although I did find some instances where contours in the doors caused some complication with thinness of the graphics, specifically with the white number boards on each of the front doors as well as the second yellow stripe from the top on each rear door.  What I will give it though is that while the graphics aren’t perfect they are at least sealed in by a coat of clear coating to help protect them during normal operation and that is something we’ve seen missing in some of the other brands known for their higher level of detail.  Detail wise we have a couple of things worth mentioning. The hood has a separately applied air scoop, the trunk has it’s separately applied huge deck spoiler and the roof and doors have items like the durable side view mirrors, a roof mounted antenna and something that is either a smaller air intake for the cockpit or an on board camera pod. I’m not too sure on that last one so you lucky readers who get to watch televised rally races might have to fill me in on that item.  In the cockpit we have our driver and map holding co driver, details like a painted-on dash board instrument panel and fire extinguisher bottle as well as a full role cage and a spare rim with tire that actually sports a tire tread more closely matching the tires used by the Pajero and Pro Trucks from Ninco.  Speaking of rims… the gold rims of the ProRace Subaru carry a more typical ribbed racing tire in place of the more ‘knobby’ tire found on the in-cabin spare. The tires sport the Ninco brand name and thankfully only required some light truing to get as flat as possible. Performance:  Flipping the Ninco ProRace Subaru over allows us to get a look at the first of several ‘ProRace’ features. Sitting just in front of the three yellow squares above are brass metric screws that will require a small flat tipped screwdriver instead of the normal ‘Phillips’ type of screwdriver tip.  What benefit is provided with these screws? As you can see by the differences between the ‘normal’ black screw and the metric screws used here, the thread of the metric screw is much finer than the normal screw. While that might not make much of a difference to some it does allow for the screws to be backed off from full tight and still allow for a considerable amount of screw thread to me left to hold the body on. The smooth section near the head of the metric screw is truly an advantage for this application as some will debate that backing the screws off on a slot car can alter the performance of a car and improve performance overall. Did I notice a change when I backed mine off? No, not really.  The next feature in the ProRace line up is the use of a dual drive band system to power the front axle. This is again a place for some debate as there are some who feel that the added weight provided by the additional parts can actually take away from a slot cars performance. Good news is that if you are one of the ones who think running all wheel drive is a waste of time in slot car racing it is very simple with this design to simply remove the dual pulley belts and run this car strictly as a rear wheel drive.  In the back end you can get a better idea of how the dual transmission system works. The brass motor pinion works with the crown gear to spin the real axle and on the axle are two red plastic pulleys rotating matching red rubber drive belts. In some of Ninco’s other all wheel drive rally cars, like the VW Golf for example, a single pulley and drive belt is utilized and it seems to provide the same result. My guess here is that the second belt is in place to eliminate any chance of the single belt slipping, a form of traction control if you will.  The next ProRace feature is the hardened steel axles found on the Ninco Subaru. These hardened axles spin inside of another ProRace component in the form of ball bearing axle bushings.  The use of ball bearings helps to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the amount of friction experienced by normal slot car bushings. The design itself is a nice one although I did find that my Subaru came with its rear axle bushings snapped out of their mounts. That sort of ruled out that sought after ‘out of the box’ performance as I was forced to open this car and correct the issue before it could even turn its first lap. Once the axle was snapped back in place and the normal pre-running braid adjusting and greasing was completed it was finally time to see what all of these ProRace features meant for the Subaru’s performance. Running first in the stock magnet configuration the Ninco ProRace Subaru managed a fast lap of 3.199 on the Carrera test circuit. That time placed it nicely between a 3.187 run by a Monogram GS Corvette and a 3.214 accomplished by a FLY BMW 3.5 CSL. Looking at a more recent test of a different Ninco product the ProRace Subaru topped the best time set by the Ninco BF Goodrich Pro Truck that managed a nice 3.772 even with its higher center of gravity. Running non-magnet the times got a little closer. The ProRace Subaru became more than a second per lap slower pulling off a 4.271 lap as compared to the Pro Truck that managed a fastest 4.546 best time. Sure the ProRace Subaru was still faster but was it because of the fancy ProRace components or was it because it’s a smaller car, with the lower chassis and lower center of gravity? Was it faster because it has all wheel drive with smaller ribbed tires compared to the larger diameter knobby tires of the rear wheel drive truck? Or was it faster because of the Subaru’s NC6 Crusher motor making 23,500 rpms, some 4,200 more rpms than rated on the trucks NC7 Raider motor? The Final Verdict:  While the Ninco ProRace Subaru WRC is a nice car with some really nice features I’m not 100% satisfied that those features do a lot to increase the cars performance over a non ProRace Ninco rally car. The ProRace Subaru did turn some nice magnet laps while in stock trim and when you let off of the throttle the car almost could stop on a dime. In the end though I wasn’t nearly as blown away by the cars performance as I was expecting to be considering it wears the title ‘ProRace’ in its name. It is however a great addition to the 1/32 rally car ranks and I have no doubt that some of you will be able to get even more out of the cars performance with a bit more tweaking and run time. 
Video will take about a minute to download on a 56k modem. Click Here To Download Ninco ProRace Subaru WRC Video Thanks go to the folks at Model Rectifier Corporation for providing me this new Ninco ProRace Subaru WRC slot car . As always, feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions and I will be happy to answer anything that I can. Happy Slotting! Shawn Smith SJSlots@hotmail.com |
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