Carrera Go Police Chase Impressions
Posted by John on October 14, 2008
I received my Carrera Go Police Chase set over the weekend.
Initially I’m very impressed with the quality of the track and parts. For a product that is considered “toy-class,” the assembly takes a little bit longer than I would have expected, and it seems like some of the parts could break fairly easily if they were handled roughly. The track has a rigid feel to it as opposed to more flexible tracks like Scalextric.
Putting the track together there are tabs on the end of each track piece that slide into one another along with the connectivity tabs. Once that goes together, there are clips that go on each side of the track to hold it in place. When I first received the set, I did set it up without putting the clips on very quickly in a temporary spot just to try it out. It will run reasonably well without putting in the clips, but it did seem like the track wanted to separate without the clips. I think you could really only run it clipless on a very small track for a short period of time.
Once you attach the clips, the track becomes very solid. You can have a 4 or 5 piece section of the track that is a very firm, you can pick it up as one unit. It has a nice rigid feel - it feels very weighty and very substantial, not at all like a kid’s toy. But, being that it’s rigid, I would wager that stepping on it for instance (if you have it set up on the floor) would be a bad thing. It would probably damage some of the tabs.
The only piece that I wasn’t totally enthused about was the guard rail attachments. Everything else, like I said, has a very solid and well connected feel when it goes together. The guardrail tabs tend to slide around and seem to come off very easily. They could be a little bit tighter fit. On the other hand, they look very cool when attached, especially along with the red and white striping on the edge of the turns.
The cars are pretty nice. They aren’t quite as detailed as 1/32nd scale cars, but they are a little nicer than I expected. They have some very nice detail elements. The police car has working police lights, which is very cool. The Corvette actually has a blue light underneath it that lights up as it goes around - the car has a clear bottom, and the light is inside.
The cars are very powerful on this track. For a track this small, you can’t really open them up without shooting them off the track. With the turbo button on the controller (I’ll talk more about this in a minute) you can pretty much remove the car from the track at any location just by hitting that button.
The police car has a higher center of gravity than the Corvette. I haven’t done much racing on the set yet (just a few laps with my girlfriend), but the cars definitely feel a bit unbalanced with an advantage going to the Corvette. I prefer stock set cars to be a bit more closely matched than these.
On the default layout, there doesn’t seem to be a distinct lane advantage.
The controllers are interesting. The feel of the plunger is a little stiff, but I was able to get decent control out of it. It obviously doesn’t have the feel of a good aftermarket controller from Parma or similar. But it does have the interesting (slightly gimmicky, but still fun) turbo feature. According to the manual, the plunger takes you from 0-70% power, and the turbo button is 100% power. On this particular set, I can use the turbo button coming out of one of the turns toward the straight away for a split second tap - any longer than that and the car doesn’t have time to slow down by the end of the straight and make the next turn. But it seems like it definitely gives a significant burst of power. On a track with a long straight away it would probably be a lot of fun.
Final Thoughts
For just under $50 (about the price of one good 1/32 scale car), I got a very nice full set including everything needed. The 1/43 format is nicer than I expected, feeling more like 1/32 than HO (although I haven’t tried ripping out the magnets to get the cars to slide yet!). I’d definitely recommend this set if you just want to check out the 1/43 format without a large investment. And, when Carrera Digital 143 comes out this track can be used with a digital set to build a bigger layout.
