I can still remember the wonderful smell of the electric motors & the oil. What I did like was looking at the cars themselves, saving up to buy different ones. Maybe I just didn't have the patience to find 'the edge.' I also had no one to race against.

If they stayed on the track (at the lower speeds) & went round and round that was boring to me.

They would fly off the track at speeds where it got fun. I remember that, for me, piloting the cars around the track was kind of boring and frustrating. I'm 51 now (dunno how this happened )įirst had an oval set as pictured, maybe in 1970. Kids went all the way to R/C with Tamiya and Kyosho 1/10 scale cars. My daughter got the hang of it early and one evening, went straight from her virtuoso ballet recital to just making it to the start grid, blowing away the competition in tutu and stage makeup. Hobby eventually passed on to my children. We experimented with double winding, heavy gauge and stagerred commutators. The fastest cars had scratchbuilt frames and clear lexan bodies. Front wheels ever hardly touched the track during the long straights. Controllers melted in our hands during enduros, and we used STP (later banned) for traction. Motors went from the inline revel-monogram to Mabuchis to Muras and Parmas. We started with the Strombecker 1/32 plastic frame cars and moved up to Monogram and Revell and up to the really nice Cox and K&B 1/24 models. There were a couple of commercial slotcar tracks close to where we lived.

Hobby shop slot cars