The British Touring Car Championship has announced a partnership today with the iconic toy manufacturer Scalextric. Having spent half a year organising the deal, the company will now produce official merchandise for 2016.
The new ARC-PRO set, can be controlled through an app on the users phone, proving how Scalextric has had to move with the times in order to continue to be relevant for a modern audience. The track though remains relatively unchanged with the two lane cross over style still prevalent.
The aptly named ‘BTCC Touring Car Challenge’ will include scale models of four cars from 2015. These include; Colin Turkington’s Team BMR VW, Andrew Jordan’s 888 MG, Matt Neal’s Honda Civic Type R and Rob Collard’s WSR BMW 1 Series.
To add, Scalextric will also sell six 2015 cars individually. These include the Honda’s of Neal and Shedden, the BMW’s of Andy Priaulx and Sam Tordoff, as well as the cars driven by Jack Goff and Jason Plato.
Finally, there will also be a ‘BTCC Champions’ edition with the Turkington and Gordon Shedden title winning cars from 2014 and 2015 respectively. “Every kid, and some big kids, had Scalextric when I was growing up.” commented Shedden. “I remember having some epic races and fun and even had a track set up full time in the spare room!”
Alan Gow, BTCC Series Director, said: “We are really excited by this partnership with Scalextric. The brand is a legendary household name and fits perfectly with the BTCC… it’s great to announce something different that we believe will excite and inspire people of all ages and indeed the next generation of BTCC fans.”
While the Scalextric Marketing Controller, Jim Procter-Blain, said: “We’re very excited to announce our new BTCC range after working with the well-loved touring car series for just over a year. We’re delighted to have BTCC included in our very first app-based ARC PRO set, and we can’t wait to attend BTCC events with our new range.”
View the new BTCC range on the Scalextric site here.
