Spirit Silhouette Peugeot Esso-review

The Spirit Silhouette Peugeot Elis/Esso car is a new livery and the second in a series of releases of this body. The fenders are fat, the stance low...and the livery really shows off the body lines.
It strikes me that this would be a super proxy racing car. The light weight body, perfect fit of the chassis on top of the body...
Everything fits perfectly on this car, the wheels especially stand out as being true and they spin easily on the axles.
The same front axle adjustment is present as it is on all recent Spirit releases. The motor pod design is carried over to this car too from the previous Silhouette release. The chassis has temendous flex, which is fine, but the pod also has a great deal of flex. And since this pod does not have those holes in the gear end for screws, you can't hold the motor down very well. All that torque twist the pod and creates the "high torque hop" that many companies cars have. The Spirit motor especially has this problem because of the bucket loads of power it has.
The gears on this car, as with the other recent Spirit Peugeot releases, meshes very, very well. Those angle winder gears are darn thin, but also, darn smooth. There is very little gear noise. Along with the bucket loads of torque is also tons of braking ability.

Testing notes from the Bay Bridge Carrera test track:
1. Fastest lap time was 3.2 seconds with a 3.3 average over 100 laps of testing.
2. I sanded the tires a bit just to make sure they were round and to get a bit of fresh rubber contacting the track. The tires don't really sand that well, not as well as the BMW tires. They are round so they've got that in their favor.
3. There's very little grip with the tires.
4. The magnet feels very light and doesn't hold the car very well in the corners.
5. Very easy to spin the tires whenever you want. A bit too much throttle and the car will easy spin out.

With some replacement tires I'd expect this car to be quite fast. It's got a lot of things going for it, but on my track, the tires aren't one of them.

For comparison times I did a number of laps with the Scalex Trans Am that I reviewed a few months ago (thanks again to Fantasy World Hobbies for that) and I got a fastest lap time of 2.6 seconds! But in fairness the tires are the super sticky Sloter tires, and the magnet on the Jaguar Trans Am is super strong.


Spirit has a good, solid GT type car on their hands here. The finish on the car is wonderful, the yellow is solid and the printing is good. Issues with tire stick aside this is a fast, well build car that has got lots of potential.

A recommended buy...

DaveK
Slot Car News