This is a 1968 ad for Hot Wheels die cast cars. Hot Wheels were introduced in 1968, so this would've been an intro-year ad. Not to be confused with the Hotwheels Spider, for which I found no ad campaign.

While far from the first small die-cast cars, Hot Wheels used non-scale, wider hard plastic tires which allowed them to run better and faster on the track than earlier die cast cars from other companies. They also did not stick to only modelling real world cars, but had a range of fanciful models thought up by their designers, in addition to real or hot-rodded versions of real cars.

Famously, Hot Wheels leaked the design for the new 1984 Corvette before General Motors had made it public, by releasing their die cast version before GM released the real car. Hot Wheels had access to the design in advance, but GM delayed the actual vehicle by one model year, leading to the snafu.

There have been a large number of Hot Wheels inspired video games, and at least one pinball machine.

The inventor of Hot Wheels, Elliot Handler, died at age 95 in 2011. His wife, Ruth Handler, invented the Barbie Doll! If that doesn't make them a power-couple of iconic toys, I don't know what could.

Some 1968 intro-year Hot Wheels.

Python:

Hot Heap:

Beatnik Bandit:

Silhouette:

That ramp right before the loop seems like it would cause the cars to jump, and lose enough momentum to fail to complete the loop.

I loved Hot Wheels. I had all four of those cars, and my favorite was a purple Silhouette, although I loved the Beatnik Bandit, too.

It sort of does, doesn't it? I wonder if the drawing in the ad might have taken some liberties with the layout.

I tried to search for the layout of the original 1968 set (edit: photos of, I mean), but got stymied by there being around 39049596815446 different track configurations, and most are not tagged with years or whether they were even the company recommended layout.

Beatnik Bandit

That one was based on a real car! Albeit a one-off, not a production vehicle.

The Bandit does not have a traditional steering wheel or floor pedals. Steering, throttle, transmission, and braking are all controlled by a chrome-plated joystick mounted on the center tunnel.

I always considered Hot Wheels to be the “poser” brand of cars compared to Matchbox. Matchbox just seemed higher quality to me.

IMO, Matchbox is worth a post too! There's a whole history in that line. They had airplanes, soldiers, all kinds of cool things.

Unless someone beats me to it, I'll try to do one over the next week or so. I only have enough motivation for one sorta-researched post a day, lol.