Track Builder Hot Wheels

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Verline Wesolowski

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:42:19 PM8/3/24

to letanreman

The set comes as a storage box with the start gate being the lid. Inside are 4 bits of jazzy neon yellow and orange striped track, 4 bits of orange track, some connectors and some whirly chequered flag finish line things. The whirly flags are not interconnected, so they cannot act as a proper finish gate that will tell you which car won in a two or more lane close finish. The box has mouldings on the bottom that allow you to connect track to it, so it could conceivably form part of an elevated track support structure.

There are some nice touches such as moulded (semi-circular blue-style) connectors above and below the start gates (allowing you to add track above the gate to stack several cars for simultaneous release, or even have a larger track pass straight through the gate) and cut outs to store two cars before moving them into a gate.

The release lever is on one side. You move it through about 90 degrees from upright to flat to release the cars. The gates/pins themselves are an odd design, hollow at the rear (i.e. on the side facing away from the cars) and with two different angled surfaces at the front (facing the cars). They fold down towards the cars, meaning that cars tend to be pushed backwards a little as the gate folds down before gravity takes over. Moving the lever more slowly avoids this backwards push, but then the cars often tend to snag their wheels/undercarriages on the gates and crash.

On the plus side, the two gates farthest from the lever do seem to release at the same time, perhaps because the spindle is not twisting at that point. These two gates have given fairly even results over a number of runs, although I can't claim to have done extensive testing. It therefore does seem useable as a two lane gate.

Great review! Thanks for sharing. Nice to see Mattel at least trying with the start gate stuff but your review outlines what you'd probably expect - it's a cheap-yet-better-than-nothing type of thing. But hey, it's for the kids, right?

It is pretty clever to have that notch out for the table edge...little designs like that remind that they are really thinking about things. Nothing will be up to our standards but thinking of even that little notch is pretty great.