You may be interested in my background in slot racing. Excuse me but this is aimed at those who know little about slot racing.
Fifty years ago my father bought me a Scalextric race set for my 7th birthday, just after it was first introduced. When I grew up I got interested in what I will call non-commercial (NC) slot racing where both the cars and the track are scratch-built. A friend and I built a four-lane track from hardboard panels in a big hut in his garden. Initially we raced Scalextric cars around it and eventually plucked up the courage to visit other tracks in our area. What we saw astonished us. The cars were travelling at speeds that made our cars look positively stationary! To give you some idea an NC slot car can accelerate from zero to 70mph and back to zero again within a 20 foot straight and the motors run at speeds in excess of 100,000rpm! The cars were blindingly fast.
We re-built our track as it was far too uneven for these sort of cars. The new track was 87 feet long and six-lanes, made from melamine-coated chipboard panels supported on forty-gallon oil drums. A lot of time went into designing it and it was widely acclaimed as the best track in the UK. It had a large sweeping curve over the bridge, three medium hairpin bends, and two six-inch radius corners (on all lanes), plus of course several straights. We ran both 1/32nd and 1/24th scale cars which were all custom built with some quite high technology. The motors and the back axle were fitted with phenolic resin ballraces. The motors had tiny machined aluminium heat sinks and balanced armatures. The axles were made from high speed steel, normally used for drills bits. Even the guide shoes were fitted with PTFE washers for near-zero friction! The hand controllers usually had a resistor of 0.5 ohm, compared to a commercial one at 15 ohms, almost operating as an on/off switch. The lap record stood at just 4.2 seconds, and remember two of the corners were six-inch radius! I 'retired' after a particularly nasty episode at an international race meeting on our track when a driver disrupted the meeting. The track went to Rolls Royce in Bristol.
This is me with our six-lane routed track 35 years ago!
Recently I noticed that slot cars had gone digital. This means that you can run up to six cars on one lane and with lane changing sections it is possible to overtake and dice between other competitors. The race management system is also impressive. It is possible to have qualifying laps for grid places, pit stops for fuel, and many other features. The cars are impressively detailed these days. I got the bug again and decided to buy a Scalextric digital circuit after studying the various makes on the market. I bought nearly all my track and cars through Ebay and I would like to say a special thank you to Martin Kay of Cheddar Gorge Model Motor Racing Circuit for his advice and help, and to Mike of Jadlam Racing in Glastonbury who seem to have the Ebay thing well sorted.
The track is currently being erected in the old stables of our villa here in Italy but will eventually have to move into my workshop, the old pig stys, as we now have planning permission to turn the stables into an apartment. I have based the track layout on the form of the six-lane circuit above with some interesting additions, partly due to the scope of the new Scalextric digital system, but also because six cars now only need two lanes.
