Pro Racing In The Sixties

It depends. Why don't you show us some of your handiwork?

Jonny,
take two aspirins and get over it.
Also it would be beneficial if you get off the politikal korrektion wagon and learn how to smile at yourself and others. It's much better than getting stomach cramps.
Kind regards,

Philippe

Hi Jonny,
I am already on pain pills but thanks for the advice.
My E-mail is [email protected]
Please give it your best shot.
Kind regards,

The Horrible, Awful,
Mr. Pea.

Hi Mark,
I am trying my very best to always laugh at myself and others because after all, we are but insignificant little roaches on the face of a 4.5-billion old planet.
I am sorry that some take my poor attempts at humour so seriously. Everyone is being "offended" by the slightest breeze nowadays... makes lawyers very rich.

To make anyone and everyone feel better in this awful new day (mygod, the sun DID rise, did it not?), here are more pics of oldies-but-goodies in the kollektion:





This is the last car (s'cuse me Jonny, we always called the basic chassis "car" in pro lingo, and unfortunately, the body was the first thing to go to the thrash, which is sad since many of such bodies were works of art)) built by Team Champion Bob Cozine before he retired from action in 1969. Bob was one of the top five all-time greats in pre-1970 slot racing, notching an incredible array of wins mostly in the inline period, and helping Champion to become at one time, "Numero Uno" in the business.

The most famous motor of the era with the famous "MURA-Cukras" was this "Bob Cozine Signature" version of the Champion 525:



This is an unused Dynamic McLaren body painted by the famous Dave Bloom for John Cukras, circa mid 1969:



Regards,

The Mean, Ugly, Awful,
Mr. Pea

QUOTE Making comments like that comes across as arrogant as if whatever you are involved in is top notch and the rest of us don`t come up to scratch?

Jonny, as I pointed out, I am confident that you missed the point. Dennis David knows better and laughed at the comment, and he was the one directly in the crosshairs. He knows that my comment was tongue-in-cheek, even if not acceptable in today's PC touchy-feely world or socially encouraged irresponsibility.
One of the most important things to educate future generations is NOT to make them feel good because they can't solder or cut or build or read or write ort count or analyze, but to make them angry so that they get the motivation to learn. And this is EXACTLY what modern schooling is doing wrong: you can't read? you can't write? No problem, we will graduate you anyway so that you can feel good about yourself. Isn't that grand?

I am sorry Jonny, but this is stupid (see, another aggressive word here). NO ONE is born a genius, EVERYONE has to go through a learning process. I am totally stupid about mathematics, and I call myself a calculus moron. I know and accept my weakness, but also have learned how to deal with it so I am not hampered by it. But I will take no advice from anyone telling me that it is not important and I should feel good about it. I KNOW how important it is, and fighting to improve my lack of knowledge.

Regards,

Mr. Pea

I won't comment on your sibblings performance because I have no clue.
Many of the teenagers I see today are media and school-brainwashed zombies who enjoy violence at every stage of society, movies, music, litterature (I am talking about comic books here because many can't even read), their own media-dictated image (from rings to tattoes to clothing to use of drugs and alcohol and the latest substance du jour) to their hobbies (which often implies stealing).

I just hope that your kids escaped part of the intellectual terrorism that started in the late 1960's and was designed by very motivated "intellectuals" of which only purpose is negativism in society so that THEY, the Superior Thinking Heads, can effectively take over. I hope that they will fail in the same way that their exact opposite, the Islamic intellectual terrorists, will also fail.

As far as Terry Schmid, yes indeed he re-surfaced, litterally as a rocket scientist working on the missiles sent from the Vandenberg military base in California. He had no clue that slot car racing had survived in any form. He married Mike and Billy Steube's sister 30 years ago and have 3 children.
It shows that some will escape!

Regards,

Mr. Pea
Still Ring-Free

Hi Jeff,
Yes, I could well be, because it's only MY opinion, which I base strictly on MY observations from traveling all over the world. But how do you know that YOU are right and I am wrong?

QUOTE Interesting info on Terry Schmid.
Any info on whereabouts of other
old "Slot Heroes" from the past?
E.G. Mike Morrissey, Mike Steube,
Sandy Gross, Howie Ursaner, Doug
Henline, Bob Emott, PvA et al.
Not to mention John Cukras...

Mike Morrissey is still around and lives in Long Beach. He has been working for McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) for many years. Mike was of course the publisher of Model Car racing and Model Car Journal, and built his own Taurus R/C car that failed in the market place.

Mike and Billy Steube are salesmen in a Volvo dealership in Long Beach. Mike has been seen in slot car raceways here and there but is only mildly interested.

Sandy Gross, half of the Cobra "Gold Dust Twins", is and has been for many years the president of a speaker company and makes tons of money.

Gentle Bob Emott is completely out of slot car racing and is now a limousine driver. Bob never really profited from his slot car racing knowledge because he is too nice of a guy.

Pete Von Ahrens and Dave Bloom both unfortunately died of cancer in the past few years, probably poisoned by the paint chemicals they used without much concern for so long. Dave was one of the finest painters of the 1960's, rivalling the talent of Von Dutch.

My buddy John Cukras (SpeedyWeenie and Jeff would hate him, we think exactly alike! ) is very involved in HO cars. He designed a lot of them for Racemasters and runs the SoCal HO club. Together we have been planning the World's Revolution for years. So far no luck.

Howie Ursaner visited us a couple of years ago at the Marconi Foundation for Kids Proxy races where he was Grand Marshal. he had not touched a controller in over 30 years and it took him only 10 minutes to be the best driver there. He is still...Howie, meaning a free-spirit with little attachment to material things and a great enthusiasm for life in spite of very adverse conditions at time. My kind of guy. Howie's best friend is John Cukras.

Doug Henline is into go-karting and has (had?) a kart school. I have not spoken to him in a long time.

Two original members of Team Russkit, Len Vucci and Ken Larimer, are right around the corner from our shop and are professionals in PR and lab testing. Len had a difficult time in Viet Nam, then a difficult marriage that left him broke and living in an old VW. He is having better days now. Ken is the nicest guy and works for an automotive PR firm.

Bryan Warmack and John Anderson work right out of our shop and we often have very spirited discussions debating world issues. Bryan is a fabricator of the caliber of a Phil Remington, John is the only pro racer on the planet to have won a major open-class pro race in FIVE decades! John is a machinist and drives a Subaru WRC.

And of course Bruce Paschal, who was the president of the giant Standard Fruit Corporation (often associated with ITT, the Coca Cola Corp and the CIA for plotting to conspire against South American governments for monetary gains, and Bruce has a good laugh every time there are such assertions in the media) was the sponsor of so many of the aforementioned pro racers in the 1960's and 1970's. He is now retired and lives in Palm Springs. He visits me time to time and we have long and very interesting conversations about his fantastic experiences over the whole planet. He is still a true lover of slot cars and a genuine kind and nice man. We owe him a lot, because some of the most important events in our little world could never have happened without his sponsorship.
When the NY Times ran an ad on two pages to promote the Concorde in the USA, Bruce was the man chosen as a spokeperson because of his world stature and his honesty. He also gave lectures to many organisations and has been a sponsor of many organisations fighting poverty in under-developed countries.

Regards,

Mr. Pea

Just 5 years later after the Terry Schmid inline beauty, and this is what things looked like in early 1972:



This is a Champion Ferrari 612, mold by Charlie Waters and Dave Bloom. Aero was following Lee Gilbert's ideas then.



The tape was placed on the pans to avoid shorting in extreme cases (like flat-out on the banking in the lower lanes...)



This car was built by yours truly for Bob Green and restored in late 1998. The Green motor has been replaced by a Steube-Checkpoint because I no longer had the original mill, but otherwise it's pretty much the way it was before Bob crashed it in trying to make the main that day. Bob was a super motor builder but he could not drive his way out of a paper bag...
Great guy, though.

Mr. Pea

Wankel,
First you must understand that the USA was not alone, and the UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa and other countries pros followed every move from the top players in the USA.
By 1966-1/2, the Yanks had already lost the exact-scale aspect of slot cars in highly competitive pro-racing. By the time I came in as a serious player, I had also been brainwashed in thinking that orange tires and wild paint on chopped and channeled bodies were the normality, in the same manner that many of you "liberals" (the term is opposite in France where liberals are actually the more conservative-thinking part of the population), like to think that YOUR form of reasoning IS the ONLY standard out there, and any voice of opposition must be silenced and is utterly WRONG. The same has happened to pro-racing and the British BSCRA is a perfect example of that: extremists are running the show but the actual racing attendance has strongly declined. Anyone in opposition to the semi-wing car aspect is shown the door. For over 30 years in the USA, pro-racing has gone into the search of ultimate performance as THE form of NORMAL racing, at the cost of the desaffection of most other hobbyists who just wanted to race models of real cars, and today, the open-class racers can be counted on the fingers of a half-dozen glue freaks, but because of the virtual opposition to ANY other form of racing, there are indeed fewer players and fewer raceways as many closed without even having a clue of what they did to themselves. That is serious brainwashing in my book. For more examples of this, watch the BBC.

So at the time and as a relatively young man with long hair and not much concern for important world events, I plunged myself into a life oriented nearly fully on performance-only slot cars for a period of 2-1/2 years before I regained consciousness and escaped this bizarre and extremist aquarium. Not that it was not interesting, to the contrary. But I realise today that it was harmful to the whole hobby and nearly sunk it, in the same way as some scientific experiments going awry and causing irreparable harm.
And all it would have taken is just a bit of discipline, but when I tried to push this idea in a USRA meeting in mid-1973, I encountered so much opposition that I resigned as president of the USRA and broke my ties to the hobby for 21 years.

What I have been doing since 2002 is to try re-introducing some reason back into competitive racing, by designing, financing and producing the TSRF cars and a racing formula allowing the vast majority of disgruntled hobbyists who had become "home racers" to return to low-cost, exact-scale competitive racing with reasonable performance. I feel that the toy plastic cars from Scalextric to FLY to most others are unable to do the job in stock form with all kinds of technical problems out of the box, while the Parma-style Flexis that compose 90% of the commercial raceway business also turn off 90% of the possible players because they look like some kind of cartoonish view of racing cars. And I would like to point that there is a great difference between the semi-scale pro-racing cars of the mid-1960's to early 1970's and the grossities called "scale" of today, produced by Parma, JK, Champion or other companies sucking onto the same dried bone. The TSRF bodies are, with very few others (namely TrueScale and the ones made by Milan Tomasek, the only correct vac-formed exact-scale bodies available on the market, The criteria: ALL others will not fit exact-scale wheels and tires, they are too low. And this is the secret of the future of pro slot racing: bring back exact-scale wheels and a "silhouette" body formula (based on templates) and the bodies WILL have to follow, and discipline will return along with the home racers. The recent TSRF races organized in USA, England and Belgium have proven the competitive and close racing aspect of the TSRF formula, where the hobbyists smile while racing instead of looking like they are working on heart attacks. Extremism never produces anything but conflict.

Now for the technical aspect of the old things:
The Diamond chassis was named as such because indeed, the shape of the front A-arms. The funny thing is that most copies (and the pros used them from 1973 to the late 1980's until the advent of the perimeter frame) used "L" arms because most builders just could not bend the wire and solder the arms! Problem with the "L" arms is that the slightest shunt would bend them back to uselessness. And indeed, they HAD a function, and the wheels had camber and toe-in for good reasons: there is serious drag from the guide flag inside the slot. This drag means slower lap times. By using negative camber and toe-in, the front wheels convert part of the drag into rolling friction, and that means as much as 1/10th of a second of the nearly 1/2 second advantage of the design at the time it was introduced.

The hinged drop arm on the earlier car was moved further back because I was already working on the idea that the drop arm was a mistake and the further I put the hinged on the back of the frame, the better the car got. This was not my idea but Lee Gilbert's. An experiment on this may be seen on this Lee Gilbert's late 1971 chassis I restroed recently:



Best regards,

Mr. Pea

QUOTE your references to "exact scale" might open you up to the rivet counters, though

I just spent an evening with the Tire Master, Michael Ortmann of Germany. It was indeed very interesting and educational. As the American scene has gone berserk into "normalising" an extreme form of racing with the Flexi crowd, the German went crazily in the opposite direction, hand-building and racing incredibly detailed models with the exact rivet count if not real miniature rivets! Problem is, on both sides the racer count is dwindling. On the US side, costs and the look of cars is decimating the racers base, while in Germany, the research for perfection is just making many hang their tongues in exhaustion from trying to catch up with the best.

The TSRF represents a happy middle: a simple, easy to assemble chassis that can be set in minutes (the German Scholler, Motor Modern or Japanese Plafit ot Sakatsu take hours if not days...) with a choice of either plastic model kit, injected slot cars or vacuum formed bodies. The net result is a simple vehicle that lasts, does not go too fast in which it will avoid destruction, and very affordable maintenance and parts costs. One may build a very decent car, painted in a single color with applied decals and go racing the same day, then place the car back in the box and come back for next week's race without doing anything to the car.
And this is rather unique.
Let me tell you one thing: those things are just as fun to drive as the fastest open-class car I ever had my hands on.





P.S. We don't count rivets.

Best regards,

Mr. Pea

QUOTE Now, ain't those front wheels a tad inboard on that Shell car? I mean, for an "exact scale" car?

Actually, probably. And again, we at TSRF are not rivet counters. "Exact-scale" is a term against so-called "Scale" as claimed by the US and Euro USRA/BSCRA/IMSA etc... racers with machines far away from any known cars. The TSRF is just looking for a happy medium attainable by all. Compare this to the comments I made a while ago about the squashed FLY Ferrari Daytona and GT40. These are claimed to be absolutely accurate, where are their excuses? I find them beautifully finished. Accurate, no way! So I am just looking for a bit of reason.
Regards,

Mr. Pea

QUOTE Oh, well that's clear then.

I am sorry that it is not clear to you, but in the US and other countries (like IMCA races in Italy or BSCRA in England), "Scale" races have a very different meaning than what you and I wouls normally understand. They race what is basically open-class wing-cars without the added air-control devices seen on such wing cars:
The bodies are vague approximations of real cars, bombarded by names such as "Mercedes" or "Peugeot". Why not Cord or Duesenberg?

The TSRF uses precise shapes generally made from the most accurate Tamiya, Revell or Hasegawa plastic model kits, benefitting from extremely nice molding performed by the all-time best in the buisiness, Lloyd Asbury of Lancer. They are not only accurate but at exact scale. ALL of the wing-car/so-called scale machinery today is TOO SMALL as they have kept the sizing of the chassis the same since the 1960's, while real race cars of today are ENORMOUS compared to the cars then. So the current breed of "1/24" racing cars are more like 1/28 scale...

Is it more clear now of would you like to see some pictures?
Regards,

Mr. Pea

A similar car with molded-in (insted of added-on) air control devices is called "scale" by these people. Some use images of wheel stickers glued on the body as front wheels (IMCA) to meet the rules that "a car must have front wheels", never mind if they are painted on the body.
So the answer is YES.
Now I hope that you understand that between the German or Japanese ultra-scale, rivet-count cars and the American-dictated "scale" racing, the average joe is stuck into staying home in complete despair and condemned to play with somewhat unsatisfactory plastic cars. They become unsatisfactory the minute one drives a Flexi on a wood track, in the same manner as a person convinced into the superiority of his Renault Laguna will never want to drive it again once he has been behind the wheel of a BMW M3 or a Benz C43.

This is why we have created the "happy medium" of the TSRF, because it is easy and runs good, while offering a good aesthetic value.

And this, Wankel, is what model car racing should have stuck to from the beginning.

Recently I got a message on my telephone from a 1960's Car Model Magazine writer named Ben Millspaugh (he had a monthly column there). He was totally enthusiastic about the TSRF concept that he had discovered by accident on the Net and was saying that if I had done this in the late 1960's, things would have been indeed very different from the sorry state it is today.
I could have answered him that I was too dumb then to realise how much damage us, the top pros, were inducing unknowingly.
This is no case, should stop me from enjoying the nostalgia of our old racing days.
Regards,

Mr. Pea

QUOTE But I respectively beg to differ about 1969. We were all speed crazed maniacs at the time, with more or less attachment to "scale" looking cars (already called semi-scale by the way).

No we do not differ, I agree!
It's just that now I recognize the damage done then in all innocence.

QUOTE did it ever turn up in the Post? Or maybe it's still being reconditioned at the Creteil sorting center, like my last package....

??? You mean you never received BOTH my packages?

Mr. Pea

I had a long telephone conversation with Ben when he contacted me. We discussed a specific points including the one you raised about the ignorance of the media to pinpoint other "hot" spots of racing in the country. Problem is, we had to agree with the following:

1/ Everyone HAD an opportunity to go to Memphis for the first true national professional race in the USA and team members from Champion, Mura, Russkit, Riggen, Steube, Kean, Nutley, Buzzarama, Dyna-Rewind... confronted private entries from all over the country. Some drove thousands of miles in horrible piles of metal barely hanging together to do so. About 400 of them did. And at the end of the day, the team of Mike Steube and John Cukras flatened them all with this simple but effective car:



On top of crushing the opposition, they won Concours, showing that the standards were not so hot then...



2/ The ONLY time that the traveling Team Russkit members were seriously challenged in their 1966 and 1967 country tours is when they raced against "thingies" like in Chicago against the Dyan-Rewind boys and their Shinoda thingies. Even then they were only beaten by a couple of fellows, not by an entire gang. Their Russkit Lotus 40's with jailhouse frames and rewound 16D's were a bit slower with their larger wheels and semi-scale appearance. Now they went to a total of over 260 raceways all over the nation, and dominated the racing virtually anywhere. Len Vucci however told me that in some cases they let the locals win just so as not to frustrate them too much because they had been told by Jim Russell to do so.

3/ As what happened to me when I became a factor and got LOTS of ink in the magazines, it was a question of success. While others talked, we did. When confronted with any claimers of betterness (an boy, did I get a lot of that...), we humbled them on the track.

4/ When gentle Bob Emott went to England in 1970 to face the cream of British pro-racers who were going to show the Yank how it's done, Bob inflicted them the most humiliating defeat in possibly the whole history of pro-racing and humbled them for years to come.

Rocky, what else can I say?
Regards,

Philippe

Great stuff Russell!
At least and even if they are way off actual scale, these bodies had a bit more character than the awful junk that ensued...

QUOTE All I said was that there were Denver racers who insisted they were as good as anyone.

And the point I made is that the Brits also claimed to be until Emott CREAMED them. Denver racers had the same priviledges as anyone and did not have less travel money than anyone. I hope that you get the point... I mean Gilbert and I drove a N600 Honda from L.A. to N.Y. in 53 hours, only 10 more than it took Gurney and Yates in the Ferrari Daytona in the Cannonball Run... Sleeping was accomplished in the non-reclining passenger seat and whoever was driving (mostly yours truly) was on Nodoz. Between Gilbert and I we did not have more than a hundred bucks and came home only because we won both races in N.Y.
What's the Denver racers excuse?

QUOTE Was Morrissey the best in 66?

Morrissey could not drive. He built a decent car but the others in the Russkit team were the drivers. So no, he was not the best, not even the best builder. From the chassis and cars I have, the very best was Pete Von Ahrens. His stuff looked absolutely flawless. Mine was cheap thrash compared to Pete's. And there were others who were great builders, like Henline and Schmid. Mike Steube was good at one time but drugs really got to him.
Regards,

Philippe