SMP Slide 1/8

I can't for the life of me find much stuff about SMP.

All I know is that the company started in 1997 and manufactured their 1/8 cars up until around 2005. If memory serves me right, it was started by a Swiss guy that would manufacture these cars in his garage or machine shop where he was doing other work at the same time. The company still exists to this day but now appears to only manufacture option parts for other cars in various other scales.

Due to the hobby nature of the business, SMP would manufacture at most 300 to 350 cars per year. The limited production run in turn impacted the fact that the cars were on the high side, as costs could not reach truly viable economies of scale, and hence were selling for around USD900 per car when others were going for around USD600.

Some questions ran as to the logic of running all machined arms that could in a crash break given the less durable nature of the machined arms as compared with the composite arms that were prevalent in most other cars, and the relative cost of  replacing such parts as compared with the competition.

The first that I saw one of these things running was back when I ran my Mugen MRX3. A friend of mine at the time was running this car at the local track and I was always amazed as to how gorgeous this thing was to look at with its machine parts where all the other cars at the time were already on the moulded plastic band wagon. This to me was a much more beautiful version of the PB Diamond.

To date I currently have three of these chassis, two earlier cars and one of what I believe was the last generation chrome cars to come out around 2005.

This was the first chassis purchase from the U.S. This particular sample was used and came with a considerable haul of spare parts. The radio plate was the standard carbon sample.

These cars ran inversely mounted shocks in what was believed to make the centre of gravity over on these vehicles. But unfortunately the design of the shocks also meant they were significantly harder to maintain and fill with oil. Also note the classic direct servo saver mounting on the steering of the vehicle.

The brake lever system which was subsequently seen on the Shepherd Velox again. Talk about what goes around, comes around.

The stash of spare parts that came with this acquisition.

The second chassis came from a collector in Hong Kong and includes the yellow radio plate. No idea why they had these rather cheesy coloured radio plates but hey I guess it was funky for the time. I love the gorgeous bronze Color of the metal parts, uber cool especially compared against the red plastic components when all the other cars available at the time were a boring black and silver at best.

The central brake system which applied equal pressure on both sides of the rear pulley can be seen in the below picture. Ahead of its time for sure. This is what made the Slide such an amazing car. 

The final example was a beautiful example from Australia of the chrome last chassis where the steering servo was most obviously moved to under the radio plate. This one also came with the instruction manual. This car copped a lot of flack for the chrome on it and I remember seeing some threads on Rc tech where there was a lot of comments on the chrome being too rapper. But hey, I like chrome. Hahaha.