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WEAPONS READY! by Christopher Kidder-Mostrom
Refueled”.
In less than a fortnight, it’s going to be May. The lusty month is going to be dirty and dusty, as the racing world will be rife with wasteland-style racing. As the weather turns toward summer in the Northern Hemisphere, there’s a primal call for violence and carnage on the track.
Many in the diecast racing community were first introduced to the game last summer when Robby Comeford of Diecast 64 hosted his June races. The stock and modified divisions were the same as every other month of 2020, but the featured race of the month was Gaslands.
Gaslands, a miniatures combat game that uses 1:64 scale cars as playing pieces, was first launched in 2017. Over the last four years, it has become immensely popular. It has even had a second edition called “Gaslands:
“I loved the Gaslands race last year,” remembers Comeford. “People sent in the coolest cars…I think a bunch of racers had a fun time building them.” Naturally, with the popularity of the race in the previous year, the season announcement for 2021 included a return to the Gaslands track. The track itself is of some importance in this race. Rather than the regular four lanes of orange track that Diecast 64 viewers have grown accustomed to, the track is wide and open from top to bottom, with a taper toward the finish line. It’s still a drag strip, but it is a drag strip in which the cars
8 | Diecast Racing Report
can all collide with each other from the moment they leave the gate. And the surface of the track is not smooth. It is rough and bumpy, so that contributes to the general mayhem and carnage. Comeford offers this bit of advice for competing in the Diecast 64 Gaslands race: “One thing about this track is that cars can get a little squirrelly, so I’m not sure that there is much advantage to building big.” The specs for the race do allow for cars that are taller than normal, and wider than normal (at least above the edges of standard orange track). Nevertheless, “cars with a low center of gravity and that can get out fast and avoid other cars are the ones that perform best,” Comeford shares. At the time of our interview with Robby C, he hadn’t yet received any entries for this year’s races. By now (two weeks later) that most likely has changed. “I usually start seeing cars arrive a couple of weeks prior to the deadline.”
