95 replies to this topic

[Racinthebluelane]

I got into this when a friend/coworker recommended slot racing as a way to keep my nephews entertained while I looked after them one Saturday.

I went bonkers over a green Lotus JK RTR car which my Boss purchased... soon thereafter I picked up a kit and some cars and one thing led to another and now my wife, nephews, and everyone else I can shanghai gets into this! LOL

Ya know... I still need that car!

[911GT3]

I started with HO tracks at home. After the R/C car racing died out in the Chicago area in the early '90s, a friend of mine was telling stories of all the fun he had racing and talked me into a Parma Flexi.

Raced the Flexi for a year or so while in college and gave it up after graduating and getting a real job. Went back to R/C cars for a while. Then just got back into slots January of this year.

[JEngland]

What a magical time that was. A new mall was built three blocks from our house in Cleveland, TN, in 1960. The mall was so futuristic that it looked like something right out of the Jetson's. (And still does , my office is there).

Around 1964 a new hobby business was opened by the mall owners. It was called Strombecker Raceway. It had a little black track and I can still remember taking my Father down there one night during a kids race to show him the place and ask him to buy me a car. I can still remember standing beside my dad and looking at a Cox Chaparral down in a display case. My dad surprised me and said "I'll buy you the first one and from there out you gotta buy your own".

The next car I bought, I cleaned gutters for days to buy one of those crazy fast cars with the crazy bubble top called a Manta Ray. Man, that thing was fast! About that time another raceway opened a block away! The track was swoopy and huge! It was called The Pitstop Raceway and as I recall, they had big time regional races there with lots of touring pros from Atlanta stopping by quite often. Arco? I'm not sure.

A summer later the raceway manager helped me build a piano wire chassis and we put a new faster, smaller motor in the freshly-built chassis. The new motor had a funny name. It was called a Mura. We searched the pegboard for a body for this newly-built car and I selected a purple Cox LaCucaracha body from the wall. I still have a big round scar on the inside of my thigh from dropping a huge blob of solder on my camper shorts! My parents were from out West and we traveled often. I never went anywhere without my black tackle box and that little purple Cuc could put a good *** whippin' on just about anybody, anywhere any time. That car would run like stink!

[Bad Elf]

I got started in slot car racing when my father and I started racing at home on an Aurora HO set. My first set had a speed control that used a steering wheel. The more you turned the wheel to the right the faster the cars would run on the track. Later we would start upgrading the car with larger tires and hop-up kits.

Then the hobby shop that we where getting HO slot car stuff from purchased two American slot tracks, an orange and a larger blue track.

I was totaly hooked. I was regular after school and my father and I live in the place every weekend. This surely ticked my mom off.

We both graduated from the old Russkit and Cox cars to making our own chassis. Then my father ventured into motor winding and we found ourselves in a catagory by ourself at the track.

By 1968, the track for some reason closed without any warning. But we found other tracks to race at and continued to expand our racing to organized racing in the region and accross the country.

Then I had to go to college and I left the sport for only a few years.

I could tell you more but I feel that this is enough for now.

[havlicek]

I don't remember all the circumstances exactly, but there was a local track near where I lived.

One day while walking past the track, there was a tough-looking character standing out side wearing an old Navy pea coat who sez to me in a gravelly voice... "Hey kid, lemme show you something". He pulls a beautiful slot car of some sort out of his pocket and let me handle the thing for a while. The he sez... "Wanna see it run? I can let you try it and first time's free!"

Now... I know I should have kept on walking, and I often think back to how different my life might have been had I simply not taken the guy up on his offer, but I went inside the track anyway. I was immediately taken by the heavy smell of cigarettes, rosin-core solder, and oil of wintergreen in the air, a pretty heady mix! The constant "whizzzzz" sound of the cars punctuated by the occasional curse when one of them went into a wall only added to the intoxicating effect it all had on me.

I took the controller he handed me and after a few tentative laps started to feel a kind of energy and excitement I hadn't felt before. After it was all over, I started walking towards the counter almost reflexively. In a sort of a haze, I started fumbling around in my pocket for my paper route money. The last thing I remember was the guy in the pea coat smiling an evil grin and saying... "I think my work is done here".

... Of course I made that whole thing up, but it may not be far from the truth as I really don't remember how I started. :-)

[Noose]

Pretty neat story though, John. I can relate to the paper route money for sure. I had three of them at one time!

[havlicek]

Heck yeah, Joe. Christmas tips were what I waited all year for. Those routes were big... and I had to make two or three trips to the route office to fill up on papers. All the papers I delivered have long since been out of business... like the Herald-Tribune (I think that was the name).

[Noose]

I had the Newark Evening News which is long gone. I did the Ledger in the morning - 100 dailys, 150 Sundays. Then the NEN after school with 60 dailys. The third one was a weekly paper - Irvington Herald... way too many. LOL.

[havlicek]

Boy, you're bringing back memories!

I had one route that was close to 200 dailies but it was almost all apartment buildings. I'd park my Schwinn Stingray (the tall handlebars were perfect for the canvas route bag) outside the building and carry the route bag inside. After riding the elevator to the top floor, I'd work my way down sticking my head out of the elevator door (so as not to lose the elevator) and just flip the papers to each apartment on my route. There was one nut-job kid in my route office that did his route on a mini-bike in NYC!, and never did get tagged by the NYPD. I still remember the route office manager... Mr. Rico.

Funny, I often forget stuff from last week but I remember all of this stuff like it was yesterday.

[tonyp]

Leave a bike outside now and it would be stolen before you got to the elevator.

[havlicek]

I was thinking the same thing, Tony, and they'd probably crack you on the head (or worse) for good measure. On collection day, I'd be riding around with what was (for those times) a pretty nice wad of cash also. I hate to think of what an easy target that would make today.

[Noose]

Kids don't do it anymore. Adults do. Deliveries are made in their cars. Bills are mailed and paid by check. I guess you can say paperboy/girl has gone the way of the eight-track.

[trailerkeith]

... and the milkman or drive-in movie.

I got into this because Elmsford was 10 minutes away from a new mall (back in 1982) called the Galleria in White Plains NY. Instead of me making my mom's life miserable shopping in a boring (lets face it, seen one seen them all) mall, she'd drop me at Elmsford with $5 and told me she'd be back in an hour or two, and to not spend it all right away. When my birthday rolled around I got a Womp and a Turbo controller, and was told if I can drive that, I can drive anything. All together I think it cost 40 or so bucks and I was off and running in my own car. When I started to bring friends around (lets face it I thought I discovered this place even though it had been open already for 15 years) I got a few of them hooked.

Now with houses, mortgages, kids, carers, marriages, alot of them will meet me once in a blue moon but life has definitely got in the way of a really fun time racing with the old group of friends.

In a few years, their kids will be old enough to race on their own, if so encouraged, and I am really good at encouraging kids to race, especially my 4 year old niece. The Nuvolari track makes her mad though because of how far she has to walk to get her car. Who knows, the next great racer/builder/or manufacturer can be one of those 3, 4 or 5 year olds in that group.

Keith

[tonyp]

So you were one of those pain in the *** kids I pushed out of my way when I was there to run group 7 cars.

[JerseyJohn]

In Denmark, Scalextric was the track to have, as Fleischmann was too expensive and Revell too "exotic".

I replaced my HO train with a Scalextric track around 1967 and together with a good friend we started "serious" racing on a 50 meter six-lane wooden track in a nearby town in 1968. Our fastest cars then was a British 1/32 RIKO with a 16D motor and we were blown away by the other drivers' scratchbuilt cars :-)





The car on the pictures is a replica of the RIKO I built a couple of years ago for my friend's 50th birthday.

I have just taken up racing again four months ago after some years pause due to illness.

Niels, DK

Great Cars, Stay well and enjoy the racing!!!

[Mark Johnson]

When I was a young lad Jolly's Toys and hobbies in Apache plaza had a small aurora
track set up that you could run your vibrator ho cars on for free. I shoveled sidewalks
and driveways untill I could afford one of the $1.99 beauties , a 62 tan galaxie.That
was the begining of the end.

[Tim Neja]

I had an older brother-- in 1961 in Costa Mesa Calif. the local hobby shop owner built a track in his back building. It had elevation changes, a mountain- 6 lanes and not really designed specifically for racing. He used coin op quarter starters-- put in your quarter and you got 1/2 hour of run time! Just wait in line for the track, if it was crowded, you got to race about once every 2 hours or so. We ran Pittman motors with 55 chevy and 40 ford hard bodies on them! No racing, just run what ya brung around the track.

Later, in 1964, Ted opened Miniature Freeways on Newport Blvd again in Costa Mesa. It was his own design track designed for racing! 8 lanes with a hillclimb style crossover. Our big claim to fame was we were the local team that won his major 24 hour "Enduro" race for LeMans coupe style cars. I've still got one of the old chassis we used in the race!! We beat the factory Riggins/ Cox/ and Associated teams with Reedy/Hustings/Curtis running. Big fun -- dropped out of racing in 1966 when I went to high school!!

Later, raced for Team Associated in 1/12 scale RC racing from 1978 to 1994 on their factory team. Just got back to slot racing a couple of years ago.
LOVE the new D3 racing!!
CYA at Buena Park!!
Tim

[Gus Kelley]

Hey Guys! My first intro to slots was about '61. It started with a battery powered home track, can't remember man. With-in months my dad brought home a strombecker set. With it soon came boxes of extra track. What a mess in our living room. My dad never stopped at simple. For example when my older brother show an interest in tropical fish, before long we counted over 160 aquariums in our house and shop building behind our house. Anyways, Hagginwood Raceway opened up down the road apiece. I believe '62, I'll have to research. That's my start. At that time there were more than a dozen tracks in operation. We used to have track teams, both junior and senior with once-a-month races at different tracks that participated. If I remember there were six or eight tracks in that series. I want to say that up to '67 that as many as a hundred raceways had come and gone in the greater sacto area. Hey Russ"Team Burrito", I remember Jimmy and Johnny Ng well also Keiji. I raced Ednas' a few times in series races and others but can't remember exactly where in the "City" they were. I remember parking was tough and they had a very crwded store. My lack of location memory probably comes from always riding with others there. Gus

[Rhett]

I got started into slots in 1985 at the age of 7 while living in Winter Park, FL, my dad raced in the 60's and came across a track in Orlando. He took me there and I was hooked, moved back to Houston in the summer of 85' and continued racing a P.A. Watson's tracks until 92'. I started racing R/C in 1991 and the combination of both was too much of a hit to my dad's pocketbook. I raced till 99' winning one National Championship and making the A-Main at many National events and even qualified for the World Championship, then as the story goes met girl, got married, had kids and know with know time or money for R/C, I took my Dad to a slot car track in FT. WORTH in 2002 and I have been racing since, he raced intil his death in 2005. So I owe this passion for slot cars to my Dad.............Rhett

[greggt40]

I got started in the 60's with a Strombecker set at home. I can still remember some new musical group called the Beatles playing on the radio while my brother and I raced on the home track. Unfortunately, I think the Beatles were relatively unsuccessful and faded into obscurity, unlike me, of course.

[Vay Jonynas]

The ads that Monogram ran in Boy's Life magazine in 1964 for their new line of slot cars left me a keen desire to get one of these little marvels:

 

 

 

 

My youthful enthusiasm was further stoked when Monogram released a series of Le Mans sports car prototypes a few months later:

 

 

 

 

 

I mean being able to race car models that you'd built yourself? I mean talk about rad cool! Evidently lots of kids felt the same way in 1964-65. As a result the number of commercial slot car tracks in the United States like the ones in these pictures reached 3500 by late 1965: By 1966 there were also three relatively small ones in my hometown of London, Ontario.

 

I managed to score my first slot car kit in the summer of 1965 at a hobby shop on the north side of Seven Mile Road just west of the Southfield Expressway in Detroit. It was a 1/24 scale Monogram 275P very much like this 1/32 scale one:

 

 

 

 

I carefully assembled it and then took it to the nearest slot car track at the hobby shop above Cowan's Hardware on Dundas Street in downtown London. Well my lovingly assembled car could not hold the track which happened to be banked. It would slide down the banks! Bummer. I had to buy and install a pair of polyurethane slicks to get enough traction to run my car on the track. This sapped my enthusiasm for my car though since in my eyes I'd had to bastardize it with non-Monogram parts.

 

The following summer while revisiting the same hobby shop on Seven Mile Road in Detroit I saw both this 1/32 scale Ford GT and this 1/32 scale Ferrari:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I chose the Ferrari (although these days my choice would be the Ford GT). Monogram had made improvements to its slot car line by adding slicks and a swing pick-up arm. So once again I bought the kit and carefully assembled it. Back I went to Cowan's and lo and behold my newly built slot could definitely run! Unfortunately, I ran it a bit too fast some of the time and crashed it occasionally. But this would cause pieces such as the headlights and lug nuts to fall off the car! Worse yet, the lug nuts were tiny and I couldn't even find them. Shriek! My beautiful car! So I abandoned any thoughts of running it again. It's still missing the two front lug nuts.

 

A year or so later I sold the 1/24 scale Ferrari I first assembled for $5.00 to Jim G. down the street. I thought I'd done well since I'd paid less than that. Well I should have kept it because even assembled it would fetch perhaps $150 today. 

 

Meanwhile slot car racing technology advanced so quickly in the 1964-67 period that kids found their lovingly built cars to be uncompetitive within months if not weeks of purchase. Moreover by 1968 kids couldn't master or even afford the best technology/techniques available. And with the advent of ever more aerodynamic bodies made of lightweight Lexan instead of traditional styrene plastic, the link to model building was broken. Therefore a new crop of ten and eleven year olds didn't replace the fifteen and sixteen year olds moving on to other interests, e.g. real cars, guitars and girls. As a result by 1970 all three of relatively small slot car tracks in London had closed. 

 

My own interest in slot cars though was rekindled circa 1975 when a buddy of mine Gerry B. declared his intention to build a massive track at his father's counter top plant where he worked. There was plenty of room. I popped into McCormick's Hobby Shop on Oxford Street to see what old slot car inventory was still in stock. There wasn't much but the woman running the shop had put the remaining slot car kits up for sale. No Monograms but I bought a 1/24 scale Revell Lotus:

 

 

 

 

But even after buying the Revell Lotus at McCormick's I still wanted to find some of the Monogram slot car kits I had coveted as a kid. I therefore hopped into my 1973 Dodge Charger and set out for the big city of Detroit. While the hobby shop on Seven Mile Road was long gone, surely there'd be some Monogram slot car kits at the huge Hudson department store on Woodward Avenue! 

 

I was wrong. Hudson's had no Monogram kits but they were blowing out a couple dozen 1/24 scale Cox I.F.C. from 1967 for less than half the original retail price. These featured what was in 1967 the radical new iso-fulcrum chassis which transferred weight to the rear wheels when accelerating and to the front guide post when slowing down to corner. These were all sold in a rather unattractive box where the car model - Chapparal 2D, Chaparral 2E, Ferrari or Cheetah - was merely checked off on the side of the box:

 

 

 

 

 

I could also see that the styrene plastic parts were thin and cheaply molded. The bodies were in fact chopped, channelled and streamlined variants of the real thing. Everything about these kits was designed for "go" instead of for "show". I bought the Chapparal 2D. Today though the much cooler looking Cheetah would have been my choice:

 

 

 

 

Neither kit was nearly as nice a model as the two Monogram Ferraris I'd assembled as a kid. I thought the Cox Chaparral was particularly shoddy looking as a model. I was in a word disappointed with the cars. Moreover my buddy's enthusiasm for building a track quickly faded since the venture involved far more work than he was willing to do. With no place to race my new cars, I put them both away with my Monogram Ferrari in a desk drawer and thought no more of them.

 

Fast forward to 2001 or so. I'd been slowly adding mint-in-box Monogram slot car kits to my model kit collection for about ten years and I bought a book on the history of slot cars by Philippe de Lespinay. In this book I discovered that the Cox slot cars were the most highly prized as collectibles because they featured cutting edge technology when they were issued! A few weeks later I ended up taking a dealer's $650 bid for the Cox Chaparral I'd built in 1975. I didn't at the time have any nostalgia for it since I much preferred the Monogram Ferrari I'd built as a fourteen year old. But you know I could have bought a dozen or more of those Cox I.F.C. kits being sold for $5.99 or so at the Hudson store that day some 45 years ago. I could probably get $2000 for each today if I pieced them out slowly!

 

I've continued to slowly add unassembled slot car kits to my collection though. Here's a close-up of the shelf in my model cabinet where my slot car kits reside:

 

 

 

 

All in all I have 22 Monogram, 5 Revell, 5 AMT and 1 Hawk slot car kit at present. As model car kits, the AMT ones are at least as nice as the Monogram ones:

 

 

 

 

 

 

My taste in both cars and slot car kits has evolved somewhat over the last 55 years. The kits I'd now most like to add to my collection are these in rough order:

 

 

1/24 Revell Rat Fink in Lotus

1/24 Monogram '40 Ford Pickup

1/24 Monogram '36 Ford Coupe

1/32 Monogram Ford GT

1/24 Monogram '56 Chevy

1/24 Monogram Indy Lotus

1/32 Monogram Lotus 33 GP

1/32 Monogram Ferrari GP

1/32 Cox Cheetah

1/24 Cox Cheetah

1/32 Revell Jaguar

1/32 Cox Ford GT

1/24 Cox Ford GT

1/25 Cox Dan Gurney Ford Stock Car

1/25 AMT '57 Ford Thunderbird

1/25 K&B Aurora Cobra GT Series 2

 

 

Note how many pre - I.F.C. Cox slot cars are now on my list!

 

 

The 1/24th scale Revell Lotus 23 and the 1/32 scale Monogram Ferrari 330 P/LM I assembled so many years ago still reside proudly on the upper left of the slot car shelf pictured above. Here are some close-up shots. The bigger car on the left is the Revell Lotus while the smaller one is the 1/32 scale Monogram Ferrari.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's my technical advisor inspecting a few of the slot cars from my collection to ensure that they're up to his quality standards:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[don.siegel]

Great story and pics, thanks. 

 

Looks like your tech inspector is a tough guy! 

 

Don 

[Vay Jonynas]

 

Looks like your tech inspector is a tough guy! 

 

Well he certainly has a nose for detail.

 

[Vay Jonynas]

Any more stories?

[993]

Started with a Strombecker track for Christmas in the late 60s.

Can't believe how cheap a track was 60 years ago compared to todays prices.

Early 70s it was HO at a neighbors garage.

Still have a track in my garage now.

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