I've seen this car advertised as coming out in late 2012 by both Carrera and Scalextric. What, no Pioneer? Come on Jules, get with the program! Let's see if we can have a choice of three! Seriously though I am looking forward to these coming out, will buy a Scalextric one as we got that General Lee running pretty good recently.
Sadly, unless Scalextric is changing their game, this will be a repaint of the wrong Charger body - ala The Torino they did, or the Bumblebee Camaro. However, on a good note, I know the person that did their artwork so that will be good and it will run well.
Pioneer already has Charger race cars on its agenda, but It will be some time before we see any. When Pioneeer does them they will be proper race cars, not repaints of the road cars. That means the only part of the existing Charger road car that will be carried over is the chassis, if that. Right now, however, Pioneer is still working on getting their factory up and running so they can produce all the cars for which the design work, and in some cases the tooling, is already done.
Meanwhile, at least one Charger race car prototype, heavily kitbashed from the road car, already exists and has preliminary approval for development, but there are a lot of cars ahead of it.
If Pioneer does a Charger 500 then I guess there is a minute chance of a Torino Talladega for it to run against? I tried making my own a while back from a Pioneer chassis and a Carrera body, it can be done ...
Please don't forget that "regular" Chargers raced just as much and more as the smooth-backed Charger 500, which was somewhat rare and just suited for superspeedway racing. I have not done research to see if the blue and gold Allison Charger ran short tracks with the traditional Charger configuration, but I would suspect it. They didn't run the short tracks with the nose and wing variant either, typically. I think we can cut some of the manufacturers some slack on this one (although I wish Carrera would have released more racing Chargers in the "500" configuration - only one to date (and with an infrequent NASCAR competitor to boot (Unser)) is crazy).
A disproportionate number of NASCAR releases by Carrera and Monogram have been of viritual "one off" cars that just raced a race or two at Riverside (Gurney, Jones, etc., as well as virtual unknowns like Kevin Terris), which I think shows the road course bias in the greater slot car community - not that I'm complaining (the more cars the merrier!), but I would like to see more of the cars that competed in NASCAR week to week (although I conceed most slot tracks are set up in a road course configuration).
Plus the Monogram Wendell Scott car is a fantasy livery. He ran Galaxies in 1967 into 1968. He also never used Petty Blue, although he did have the Petty style numbering and blue paint. Why they didn't do his 1965 Galaxie rather than a Fairlane is a mystery. I guess it is the car he wished he had in '67 ...
Bobby Allison Charger 500
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