Back in the ‘60s my friends and I spent a lot of time and money on slot cars, a relatively new product at that time.
We started with out-of-the-box Airfix and Scalextric cars before enhancing their performance by re-winding the motors for extra power.
We finished up with a chassis made from bonze tube built to a design published in magazines, “naked” motors wound by us by hand with the go-to wire size and supplier, the best-of-the-lot front axle assembly and one of two rear axle/gear set assemblies, topped off with a clear vacuum formed “blob” body which looked pretty close to the real car and painted on the inside for a nice shiny finish. A bit like a modern supercar build really.
We had a big Scalextric track at school on a large board on pullies, lowered to rest on top of the bench vices in the metalwork room at lunchtime and hoisted up out of the way for lessons.
We also had a home made track in a friend’s roof space using hardboard (masonite here) with slots cut by a router and aluminium tape for the conductors. This featured hills and dips and various bend radii and a tricky part situated rather too close to the narrow angle between rafters and roof tiles to enable speedy recovery if a car went off!
Another bright design idea which didn’t work was a wet race simulation. The combination of water and electricity blew the lighting circuit we were plugged into.
Things have moved on since then, in particular the robustness of the cars.
Outlaw Slot Cars offer a great track design and fast cars which are very durable.
The basics remain the same and one of the key features is having enough marshals to put the cars back on the track after the inevitable off.
We used their 8 slot track with a nifty system to ensure that all competitors race on all slots so as to even things up.
Each track is colour coded and you are allocated a start colour, a car and sheet of 8 coloured stickers. Simply put the correct sticker on your car and put it in the correct slot, find the control matching your colour and off you go.
Every 3 minutes the competitors, and their car, change slots (and car stickers) with a rotation system which sees some as marshals and some as competitors but all getting 8 sessions on the track.
In case you are wondering about the stickers, they are so the marshal knows which slot to put your car back into to!
The challenge is to cover as many laps as you can in your 8 sessions, which means going as fast as you dare without falling off too often – as in real racing really but the consequences of an off are far less!
The timing screens are a bit too small to easily see from the competitors position but they cleverly show not only how many laps you have already done but predict how many you will have completed after all 8 sessions. So, even as the number of sessions per competitor changes during the competition you have a target to chase.
It was a lot of light hearted fun as the relative positions jockeyed back and forwards and some people persistently went off at the same place every lap, usually at high speed.
In the end Alex (assisted by his 5 year old daughter despite her having some difficult seeing all of the track) covered the most laps (108, fastest 10.552), Andrew had the fastest lap (8.145 seconds but only 89 laps covered), and Megan had the best balance of those two (8.286 seconds and 100 laps). So not quite tortoise and hare.
