This is where the review of this car begins to interesting. This car has some nice surprises in-store for both the analog and digital racers. It really all depends on what the official Scalextric US release of this car is like compared to the Takara.

But wait, there are 2 more screws on the bottom of the chassis, what are they for?  Well, they hold the fullsize cockpit to the chassis.  DO NOT remove these until after you take the body off, otherwise you will mess up some wiring if you try to take it all off in a single pass.  If you look at the photo above, you will see some tape that is holding the wires to the side of the cockpit walls.  There is a wire on the driver's side and one on the other side.

You can just barely make out the notations beside each of the screw holes that the screw sizes are marked on the chassis.  The other part that that you get the first glimpse of here near the gear is the silver bar that comes from inside the chassis, wraps around the backside of the gear then heads over into the wheel area...thats the bar that holds the brake calipers and rotors that I was referring to earlier.

Now then lets talk about that module. In the car that I got to work on, the module is nothing but a dummy module that merely transfers the power from one connector to another. You can see by the photo to the left that you can remove the module and drop in the Scalextric / Takara Sport Digital module and congratulations, your car is now digital. No soldering in a board and having to find a spot on the chassis to fit it into without interfering with anything else. The part that I don't know, is what the incremental weight of the digital module is.

Interesting note to make here...if you removed the module to get the body off, to tune the car, you have to remember to slide the module back into the car when you true the tires if you are like me and normally do the first trueing of the tires with the body off, so you can clean out all the rubber scraps with a paintbrush. I couldn't figure out why the car wouldn't run on the trueing station. I turned it over to check out the braids, then realized...Oh Yeah...that module passes on the power to the motor! Okay, you can quit laughing now!
I hope that the Scalextric US releases of these cars have this modular approach to the digital chips too!

Now for the last bit of the inside, lets take a look at the braid pickup and the motor area.
I was hoping to see Scalextric take the pickup design off the drifter cars and utilize it on other cars, but thats not the case here.  These braids and pickups are just like you will find on the last round of NASCAR rides that were introduced in 2005.  The part that is refreshing is to see the wire leads being managed very cleanly, complete with heat shrink wrap protecting the electronic components.  Very Nice Scalextric designers!

If you check out the motor photo, you can also see that bar that holds the brake calipers and rotors.  More about that bar in the tuning section.  The part that jumped out to me in this part of the car is the huge blobs of PTFE grease.  Its everywhere.  Its in the gears, in the bearings, on the axles,  You can see the blob on the front axle in the left photo (its the white blob in the top right corner).  Personally, I would take this car completely apart, clean off the excess lube, put the car back together and re-lube the car correctly do its not all over the place.

The last part of the look inside is the cockpit.  For this car, its a full cockpit that screws to the chassis.

The chassis is going to make this car a little interesting to deal with if you are running cars in a club or venue that is a no-mag shop. Since the cockpit sits flush on the chassis and screws to it, there is no room to put lead underneath it, and no room to put lead between the sides of the cockpit and body.
Part to note here about the long rear deck, is that the pieces that stick down, they push down on the rear brake caliper bar to keep it from flopping around inside the car.

Time to move on and do a little tuning on the car.