Tracks

Tracks is the Autobot who cares more about his finish than the war. His Hasbro tech spec has other Autobots calling him a "lousy Earth-lover" because he prefers his sleek Earth car form to his original robot form, and he assumes they are simply jealous. The cartoon leaned into that hard: voice actor Michael McConnohie played him with a clipped upper-class drawl modelled on Thurston J. Howell III from Gilligan's Island, and Tracks spends most of his screen time delivering lines about refinement while everyone around him rolls their optics.

His defining episode is "Make Tracks." Parked in a run-down New York neighbourhood with Blaster as bait for a car-theft ring, Tracks gets bored, takes an unauthorised joyride, is shot up by the very thieves he was hunting, and crashes into a streetlight, too damaged to transform. He is recovered by Raoul, a young car thief and graffiti writer who becomes his unlikely partner and the closest thing Tracks has to a friend. Together they unpick Megatron's scheme to convert stolen cars into remote-controlled drones. The pairing returned in "Auto-Bop," where Tracks turns down invitations to dance, sniffs that the Dancitron club is not his kind of place, and then puts himself between Raoul and a barrage of red-hot rivets, explicitly risking the paint job he prizes.

The vanity is real but it is not cowardice. In "Masquerade" he takes to the air, is mocked by Dead End for his "droll" flying car mode, and answers by blinding him with the black beam gun so the Decepticon drives straight into Warpath. In "Prime Target" he is captured by big-game hunter Lord Chumley and forced to race a spiked track under laser fire. The flaw the tech spec names is real too: he is hard to work with, and the other Autobots find him too self-absorbed for his own good.

In car mode Tracks reaches 280 mph and uses wings that fold out from beneath his rear fenders for sub-sonic flight, the only Autobot car of the 1985 line able to fly. In either mode he fires heat-seeking incendiary missiles from shoulder launchers with a 60 mile range, and carries a black beam gun that blinds opponents rather than destroying them. His tech spec ratings are middling across the board (strength 6, intelligence 6, speed 7) with firepower and skill at 8, so he wins by agility and marksmanship rather than force. In "Auto-Bop" he openly admits he is outgunned and outpowered by Starscream and beats him by baiting him into flying through a half-built structure. His real limits are behavioural: his fixation on his finish makes him predictable, and any threat to his bodywork provokes rash retaliation.

• Raoul, the New York car thief and graffiti writer who salvages him in "Make Tracks" and becomes his recurring human partner across "Auto-Bop."
• Blaster, his usual field partner in the New York stories, whose taste in music and company Tracks finds beneath him even while fighting beside him.
• Bumblebee, who in "Prime Target" flatly calls out Tracks's lack of humility during a routine supply run.
• The wider Autobot ranks, who per his tech spec regard him as too egocentric and too fond of Earth to be fully trusted with priorities.

The Marvel Tracks is a straight combat Autobot with none of the cartoon's fussy aristocratic comedy, rebuilt on Earth by Wheeljack from a memory crystal rather than arriving with the Ark. Raoul, the relationship that defines the cartoon version, does not exist in the comics at all.

Tracks survives the 1986 movie era intact but effectively vanishes from the cartoon after season two, with no on-screen death. In Marvel continuity he is deactivated by an acid attack from Blot during the Arctic battle in "Dark Star!"

• Michael McConnohie built the voice on Jim Backus's Thurston J. Howell III from Gilligan's Island, a delivery he has described as "Harvard lockjaw."
• The toy is a Chevrolet Corvette C3 originally released in Japan as a Diaclone Car Robot. Milton Bradley sold Tracks in parts of Europe in the red Diaclone deco; it sold so badly it was replaced by the blue version, making the red one scarce today.
• The red European deco appears on the 1985 back-of-box mural, complete with Diaclone "CS" hood stickers rather than an Autobot sigil, suggesting Hasbro at one point planned a Diaclone-coloured release.
• The mould was later reused for the e-Hobby exclusive Road Rage, built on that red European colour scheme.
• For the 2004 Alternators line Chevrolet initially refused the Corvette Z06 licence, so Hasbro and Takara developed Tracks as a Dodge Viper instead. When Chevrolet relented the Viper tooling was given a new head and became Sideswipe.
• Later toys are trademarked as "Autobot Tracks" because the name Tracks alone could not be secured.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• The toy is a late-1970s/early-1980s Corvette C3 while the cartoon model and later Alternators toy present him as a modern Corvette, so his "real" alt mode differs by medium.
• Marvel has Tracks constructed on Earth from a stored memory crystal, which contradicts the cartoon's implication that he was simply another Ark-era Autobot who turned up on Earth (his first cartoon appearance is "Dinobot Island, Part 2" with no origin given).
• The tech spec paints his Earth-car preference as a point of friction with his comrades; the cartoon plays it purely as vanity and rarely as a loyalty issue.