Faster Than Ever First Look

A First Look at Faster Than Ever Cars

As I mentioned earlier, I put in some bids on eBay on a couple of Faster Than Ever cars. They arrived in the mail in late October 2005. Naturally this is a good time to open them up and get a first look at them.

Unfortunately for me, these FTE cars are not free of manufacturing defects. The Pikes Peak Tacoma has a faulty axle mounting, with the result that the wheels rub against the inside of the fenders. The wheels spin extremely freely if held up in the air; however the car does not roll very well at all. None of my previous PPT models suffer from this defect, so I wonder if it has something to do with the FTE axles. Eventually I’ll have to buy this PPT without the FTE wheels and see if the defect is in the manufacturing run or just my particular instance.

The Off Track, on the other hand, rolls delightfully well. I have not had the chance to do any quantifiable experiments with the car, however I have done a simple test: I have two other Off Track models, one the same model year, and one from last year. If you line them up on a short piece of orange track, nose to tail, and then push the rear car, you can tell which car has less rolling resistance. If a car has more resistance than the car in front of it, it will slow down faster; by re-arranging the order of the cars on the track and repeating the test, you can quickly determine which cars have less rolling resistance. The results are that the FTE car rolls better than the same car without FTE wheels, which itself rolls better than the car from last year. There may be some manufacturing variance between models; an ideal test would be to buy a bunch of FTE and non-FTE cars of the same model, test them all, and compare the averages. That, however, sounds like a lot of work (and, since the FTE cars would have to be imported one at a time, expensive); so don’t hold your breath.

Visually the wheels are fairly attractive although perhaps not as much as I would have thought. On the Off Track you can see through the wheels and see the detail on the “shock tower” part of the casting. The PPT has no such detail behind the wheels, so the see-through aspect is wasted.

So at first glance the FTE gimmick appears to have something behind it, although the cars are still at risk to manufacturing defects.