[swordtart]

Choose simple designs without fancy doodads to reduce the reading requirement (car wars worked best before loads of complicated component rules started to contradict each other)

We ran a good fight with subcompacts with little armour, armed with a single front mounted Vehicular Shotgun (VSG). As the VSG always does 2 points damage, that is one less dice roll (and you can gauge better if you are close to a breach).

The cars had only 10 points of armour on the most armoured side (and the sides only had 4 points) so two - five hits would breach (reducing the tedium of endless slug fests). With only a front mounted gun there was an emphasis on manoeuvring (and with low armour you were constantly turning to protect your weak side). A to hit of 6 means that if you can get the angle you stand a decent chance of hitting at sensible ranges

With no Dropped Weapons there is less clutter to keep track of (and less rules to learn).

With so little armour ramming at speed is risky and so the speed tends to stay low. Because of this you can have a much smaller arena (we even used an arena 8" x 11" arena using 15ft = 1" scale). This means you can easily scale to hot wheels 3" and remain in a small footprint. Subcompacts with the best suspension have a good enough HC that even starter characters with low driver skill (and inexperienced people) can throw them all over the place to get a firing angle.

You don't need loads of space and complex rules to have a good game.