A drome is a place for racing such as a "velodrome" where they race bicycles. It comes from the Greek word dromos meaning run or course. So one would assume it is like saying race track racers, a bit redundant.

The Drome Racers theme was a theme from 2002 to 2004 that featured character and story elements. As a kid I liked it a lot, and along with Bionicle and Star Wars were my favorite themes of the early 2000s. The main setting was the Drome, a massive racing venue with multiple biomes that could be changed at will by the venue’s overlord Dromulus. City, desert, swamps, and icy mountains were all portrayed on the box art and supplemental materials. There were also distinct racing teams, like Nitro, HOT, RED, Exo, and Maverick. They had their different personalities, color schemes, with Nitro being the “hero” team and Exo being more villainous. The sets were variously sold as individual cars or pairs of cars (in various combinations of the teams). They ranged from small go-kart size cars, to larger system cars, to even larger technic cars, and RC ones. A lot of them featured pull-back motors of various types and strengths. It was a fairly ambitious theme all things considered, and I remember it fondly.

This particular set was definitely one of those “too good to be true” ones I never had. They made three different “track sets” of this type: a straight line stunt track, a U shaped jungle track, and this one as the largest one. The cars featured fully plastic wheels on their front axles, as rubber ones would have caused the the cars to stop from rubbing up against the track barriers.

This is a perfect example of the types of things Lego experimented with during its crisis period. This set has lots of cool, fun functions that no other set has ever done - but to achieve those, it requires huge electronic control/charging units, sealed electronic car chassis, a track system with enormous parts that have never been used before or since, and a number of specialized paddle parts that are also fairly large parts that have seen next to no use. Was it fun? I'm sure it was. Was it Lego's domain? No - Hot Wheels and Matchbox dominate that market, and Lego was asking for trouble by investing so much money in this one, unique set for a segment of the toy industry in which it had never previously competed. It's important to experiment with themes, building styles, new parts, and even new play concepts in order to stay fresh and competitive, but risks like this are unwise. Compare this set to the Creator Expert roller coaster released in 2018: that also relies on large, specialized parts for the track, but those track parts have been designed to be as useful as possible in many settings and have been successfully applied to multiple themes. The roller coaster needs a large electric component in the form of the motor, but that's a plug-and-play Power Functions motor that is sold separately and is used widely in Technic. Finally, the roller coaster is a very expensive and unique set, but it's a measured risk because it's primarily aimed at the segment of AFOLs with deep pockets who had been begging for a roller coaster for years, rather than an experimental plunge into a separate segment of the children's toy market that is already dominated by a pair of giant, established firms.

This is what I love about random set of the day--seeing oddball sets like this one I had never heard of before. It's pretty rare, however, that the random part of the equation actually produces an interesting result like this one. I'd love to see a series of articles here talking about these LEGO oddities, highlighting them individually and giving more information about them (as some of this article's comments did).