TCR (total control racing)- 70s/80s toy car racing system- how did it work?

Factual Questions
1

TCR (Total Control Racing) was a slotless toy car racing system, the unique selling point of which was that the cars could change lanes. It was made by Ideal, and possibly by Tyco as well. It went by the name of TCR in the UK- what little I can find on Google about it suggests that it had the same nom de toy in the US as well.

Now, TCR was a toy that I coveted, but never owned as a child. So I never knew how it worked. From what I can recall, the track was hard, inflexible plastic, with two sets of three (?) parallel wires for the cars to run along. I suppose that this was one wire for each racing car and the third for the ‘jam car’, another TCR USP, a fixed-speed drone car which would trog its way around and around, acting as a mobile chicane. The handheld throttle controlled the speed of your car by varying the voltage- fine- but how did the ‘change lane’ switch do its thing?

2

The cars had a little transmission that would drive the left wheel only if the motor turned one direction, and drive the right wheel only if the motor turned the other direction. The reason for three electrical contacts in each lane was that one car would have the common ground and one of the hots, and the other car would have the common ground and the other hot. This way, your controller would control only your car no matter which lane it was in. To change lanes, the voltage would reverse, reversing the motor, changing the drive wheel, which would send the car to the other lane. Its momentum would have to take care of getting it across the track until it made contact with the electrical rails on the other side.

I was in college when these came out, and I bought one. The trouble was that it was not at all reliable.