Lovely obscure 2009 set, Remember this in the catalogs?!

These were my favorite types of sets when I was little

These were weird

These were weird

Oh wow! Who wouldn’t want this beauty?

Ha, I stumbled across this set and 8126 on eBay a couple weeks ago.

Pick this up off eBay a few months ago - winning

It's so obscure to see a helicopter in a Racers set.

I didn't make out these sets back then, but looking back now I see better what they were going for.

It shows that all the attention went to the design of the vehicles. I think if Lego also designed credible mini modular buildings, these sets would have been sublime.

This set needs a Jang video review.

I have this one! But, unfortunately, it's completely broken and the only things that are left are the cars without some pieces and the roads. It's not a set that I think is worth rebuilding, but it has great playability and cool stickers

Has it been ten years since I bought this for my son?

Wow, time goes by too fast.

Really looks more like HotWheels than LEGO to be honest. Still cool. I have one of those small racers from a job lot I bought a while back. Really neat designs.

I love Tiny Turbos!

@AustinPowers: It's definitely a fair comparison. I feel like the relationship between Tiny Turbos and Matchbox/Hot Wheels is in a lot of ways comparable to the relationship between LEGO trains and Märklin/Lionel or between LEGO Technic and Erector/Meccano.

That said, while the scale and "blinged out" design language of these cars was very similar to Hot Wheels, the style of roads and scenery in this are very different than Hot Wheels, since that brand's most unique claim to fame is having playsets designed around high-speed racetracks a single car wide (more like LEGO's https://brickset.com/sets/tag-Racetrack-System) as opposed to city road layouts more suited to imaginative role-play.

In that respect, I think these are almost more like a The Fast and the Furious/Need for Speed inspired "gritty reboot" of the original Town Plan sets (or their later equivalents like 355-1 which came after the introduction of brick-built vehicles with working wheels and tires) with a greater emphasis on action scenarios than everyday slice-of-life scenarios.

I will admit that while I enjoyed the creativity and personality of the Tiny Turbos sets I got via my LEGO BrickMaster magazine subscription, I found playsets like this rather off-putting — mainly for the rather naive reason that I couldn't understand why unlike LEGO Town or City, these sets made law-breaking street racers look cool and fun while making police look like the bad guys. Later on, of course, I realized how much of my difficulty relating to this idea came from growing up as a white kid in suburban America.

That's not to say that exaggerated, glamorized portrayals of thrill-seeking defiance in brands like this are a great reflection of how people in any society ought to navigate their world in real life. But at the same time, it's now a lot clearer to me that the police are not the heroic public servants in a lot of people's lives that I'd been led to expect in my own, and that fantasy play and storytelling scenarios about evading police capture might not have been such an alien concept to a lot of the potential buyers for this sort of toy.

I got Bullet Run among these sets back then, seems like in those years Lego made really bad quality stickers since a lot of the ones I applied on the cars of that set peeled off, flaked or cracked.
Still a pretty fun set regardless, I kinda miss Tiny Turbos.

I recently got a Tiny Turbo poly from Wal-Mart. I would of bought sets like these, but I was in my dark ages at the time, and only got a handful of polys. I would of used the parts to pimp out my normal 4-wide town/city cars for my populace.

Are those road plates the same height as the regular City ones?