Ray Martinez: Four Chassis from Ray's Collection
Last year Ray Martinez sent me pictures of four cars, which he was told were "Team Russkit" cars. I was very happy
to look them over, and they seem to be from the correct time period, but I could not find anything that would
prove the attribution to Team Russkit. I wrote to Ray, and asked:
When you call your cars "Team Russkit" cars, do you mean they are ones actually built or
raced by members of Team Russkit, like Mike Morrisey, Rick Durkee, Ron Quintana and Len Vucci?
Or are they cars made in the Team Russkit style? I see in my old Auto World magazines that Russkit offered a
Scratchbuilder's Kit, with cars designed by Mike Morrisey - maybe could your cars be these?
Ray responded, in part:
They are suppossed to be actual cars that the "Russkit Team" built and raced.
This what the gentleman who sold them to me claimed. I had bought them as a complete package, controllers,
parts, wheels, bodies, and some small tools. Everything was very well taken care of, and very professionally
done.
One feature I noticed about three of these chassis are the square front axle tubes. I pointed out to Ray,
this is an unusual building technique, which I'd never seen before. If we could research and find who built cars with
square front axle tubes, maybe we could discover the builder of these cars, and decide if they are, indeed, Team Russkit cars.
We began discussing this on the scratchbuilt.com Message Board, but our readers demanded to see images of the whole chassis,
not just the small images of the front axles which I had provided. Ray has kindly obliged. So you will see below
images of four cars from Ray's collection, and maybe you, our readers, can help us consider the question,
Are these Team Russkit cars? Please post your responses to our
Message Board.
Thanks, Ray!