Scalextric Micro Rally Dirt Racers

Brought this on the pretence it was for my grandson ( he's only one year old). Myself aged 62 and my brother 50 had loads of fun with it over Christmas and I have since brought another two sets. Have had no problems at all with any parts of the three sets. Love it

Picked this up on sale at Hamley's for £25 which is probably the right price for this set. Easy to set up, and the 1/64 scale suited the small amount of space we had to use it (if we had more space we would go 1/32 scale without question). After only ten minutes however, it was clear that the cars were struggling with the layout. We removed the flyover and big curve to make the track completely flat and that seemed to solve the problems. One of the cars out of the box wasn't working very well but after coaxing it along for about 15 minutes it seemed to get up to speed. Overall enjoyable but a few issues out of the box keep it from being great.

So, there was a glorious 10 minutes out of the box where this set worked perfectly. But, more often than not it just doesn't work. The hairpin curve and the flyover in particular are where the cars will stop. I believe that there is a fundamental problem with the circuit design / track. The track pieces come apart reasonably easily, which is nice, but if the circuit design puts too much strain on them, particularly where the track pieces connect, you get intermittent lost connections, and the cars will stop. I don't think the micro scalextric cars react too well to changes in gradient either, so the flyover is a bit of a problem. I spent some time on new braids as I thought that was the problem, but in the end, if you make a nice, simple, flat track layout the cars work reliably and I was able to get back to having some fun with my 3 year old son, and not cursing this set for questioning every childhood memory of scalextric that I ever had. Actually, my 3 year old didn't have much trouble with a full size set, so my recommendation would be to either go full size, or get a different micro scalextric set that is simpler in circuit design