1/43 at the 2018 Slot Car Festival Show Report.
For this year's 1/43 display at the UK Slot Car Festival at Gaydon, Erik West and I followed a similar format to last year, but in a new location. We had 4 tables along the front wall of the HO room, just inside the door.
All Festival photos by Erik West.
Nearly ready!
Table 1 had the mountain hillclimb, still a very popular attraction for the younger visitors, and some not so young! The challenge of driving the Carrera GO Mini Countryman rally cars up the winding road and wondering where the car would reappear gave lots of fun.
Table 2 was a static display of scratchbuilt 1/43 slotcars and a display of parts needed to make them. As with the previous 2 years, the centrerpieces were the visiting models.
This year they were the beautiful work of Peter Pfister in Austria, and Philippe LeBras in France.
Peter's display consisted of many purposeful looking Loti (Lotuses?), a neat little Mini pickup, his Truck proxy racing truck and a well sorted Carrera GO Ford Focus. He also showed a good selection of 3D printed chassis from his Shapeways shop.
This photo taken before the show of Peter's cars all together. all except the red truck in the middle!
Philippe's contribution was a set of 3 Cucaracha 'thingies' and a Ford Mk4, all faithful replicas of 1960s 1/24 slotcars, 2 of them complete with replica boxes. There were many double takes from people seeing them for the first time!
Needless to say, these groups of models attracted a lot of attention from the many visitors to the stand!
Also on the display we had a selection of resin bodyshells, wheels and tyres, motors, gears and all of the other bits and pieces that go to make a 1/43 slotcar.
Table 3 was a new, very twisty, farmyard rally track, that was built into a decorating table. Like the hillclimb, it was very popular with the chidren, but a few gave up in frustration at the many sinewy twists and turns!
I will add a video showing all of this track soon.
Table 4 contained the 3 Carrera GO tracks built up by Erik. Again, very popular, and I soon learned to avoid or catch the occasional airbourne Ferrari or Mercedes!
The Festival organizers 'Lets go racing' competition was an excellent way of making sure that visitors found all of the halls, including those to the rear of the building, away from the main rooms. This gave us a continual flow of interested visitors for the whole 2 days.
As our whole reason for exhibiting at the Festival is to widen the public's knowledge of 1/43 slotcars and to expand interest in the scale, we were pleased to have visits from 4 magazine journalists, who all plan to have articles about 1/43 slotcars in their future issues!
As always at Gaydon, I talked myself hoarse speaking to the many visitors to the stand, and would like to thank you all for taking the time and trouble to come and show interest in this most underrated slotcar scale!
Regards, Lloyd.