Dear José,
Thank you for your reply on the forum, and your comments. If I can help you with some additional information about Estrela, let me know, although you seem very well informed. I like very much the way you put things, in a clear way. You seem to me to be a very reasonable person.
Slot cars as a whole, and Estrela especially, are my passion so, for this reason, I am always looking to improve my knowledge about the history of these fascinating little cars, kind of some sort of archeology of the business. In the case of Estrela, I can say that my friend and also collector Pierre, who does not like so much the Estrela brand (when he wrote the article in the NSCC, I came to the conclusion that the childhood brand has a very strong appeal. For me it was Estrela, for him it was Strombecker, though he admits they produced a lot of poor [!] items), anyway, in this particular case of Estrela, we have been in the process of collecting and putting together all necessary data in order to write a book on the Estrela slot cars, the Autorama brand, as it is known here. So, we interviewed personally Mr. Mario Adler, the owner of the Estrela Factory, in his office, and he told us essentially the commercial aspect of the slot market at the time. We were also lucky to become close friends of Mr. Evaldo P. de Almeida, who was in charge of the slot division at Estrela. In addition of having worked for more than thirty years at Estrela, he was a true slot cars aficionado, and we owe him a lot of ingenious innovations, like the rotary contacts, or pads, seen on the first Corvettes and Formula Junior, which, as opposed to the A.C. Gilbert contact pads, which were soon worn out -to the point of getting holed- by the vertical rail of the track, hence a less lot complaints by unsatisfied customers. Evaldo was also one of the founders of the Scorpius Team, sort of an Estrela factory team, as was the Russkit Team in the U.S. It was one of the most important teams in Brazil at that time. He told us that foreign models were brought into the country by Varig pilots (one of the national airline companies, also at that time), who would travel to the Chicago toy fair, or even by Estrela´s employees. These "toys" were then locally copied (very skilled machine shop workers) and the hardware (mechanical components) readily available adapted to them. This the reason why the Ford GT -a copy of COX´s- has this protruding section at the rear . He also told us how the development of the Oxford motor happened. Ken Mabuchi had told Mario Adler he would need some two to three years to be able to supply motors to Estrela (an enormous demand in the U.S.), so the company decided to make their own motor. Of course, a Mabuchi motor was copied (the 16D second series, or Can Drive). No one would, or could, accept the challenge. Then, the Oxford - which produced some poor quality TVs and radios, and had some financial difficulties - accepted the deal. They would make the armatures as long as Estrela would supply them with the painted cases (cans) and nylon end-bells. For what regards the supposedly buying of the Monogram tooling for their plastic track, this also never happened. Estrela simply copied their track well before 1970, and named it "Super Pista", and it was injected in black. This occurred in 1966.
Don't forget the country was closed to the world, no importations; the country was living at the margin of the world. All this due to the Generals and the military revolution against "communism". What a joke! There was no "communism" at all.
Anyway, another factory that was an adept of the same procedures was ATMA, a company that was already manufacturing electric HO trains, in addition to a lot of other toys. Not willing to stay out of this promising market, they copied the Aurora Ford Mustang fastback and their Chaparral, only in 1/32. The result was OK, fairly good in fact, but they never reached the success Estrela had with its Autorama. Estrela also produced the "Derbirama", a copy of the Horse & Sulky" racing set, the same that was manufactured by GeGe in France. Many people in Brazil say with good reasons: "Here nothing is created, everything is copied."
There is no shame in saying that, with the exception of the A.C. Gilbert cars (poor performers, in fact), the only company that licensed Estrela and went bankrupt a little while after, all other models were some sort of copies of already existing slot cars (I have already sent a list of the aforementioned copies, see my previous posting in this forum).
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to make things a little clearer.
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