Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms SCX Morgan Aero 8 Silverstone 2009 slot car

G - I had those. I had a Rolls and a mk2 Jag.

Minic motorways, blimey that brings back memories!
eBay brings up some interesting stuff

I had a white with red roof 300SL and a Mk2 Police Jag with flashing blue light. Plus a Routemaster bus and a Bedford coach.

I still have most of the Routemaster Dave.
My Minic setup grew over the years. Eventually it went to a younger cousin. It was then passed on to some friends of their family. Eventually I retrieved some of it, but sadly little was in working order or usable...
The Fort GT40 + equivalent period Ferrari also featured at one time.

Love slot car racing or certainly the set up, design and model making that surrounds it but the actual racing I find quite a frustration as it always ends up in disaster with broken cars or some sort of failure of circuit without a clean race or clear winner

One Scalextric race at my house nearly ended in death for one of my friends which thankfully was avoided by a miracle

I was newly married, no kids and just moved into our first home which had a large well appointed open loft space with good lighting and heating and Velux windows

Access was via one of those sliding ladders on a hinged hatch, professionally installed

I thought it would make a great space for a large slot car track so I set one up and invited a few of my closest friends for a nights racing

The racing was going really well except a tough bend was proving difficult where a few cars had come off and one spun off the track, tumbled on the floor and went down the open hatch, falling down two stories on to the Ground Floor. Obviously completely smashed to smitherines.

So I pulled the ladder up and closed the hatch to avoid another disaster !!!

After another hour of hard racing and quite a bit of beer consumed another car spun off this particular corner, tumbled to the floor and landed inside the folded ladder on the back of the closed hatch

Young Andrew, whose car it was, was winning the race by a good lap and was desperate to get it back on the track, leaped forward, hands outstretched to dive on the car.

You can probably guess

Yes he flew on to the closed hatch head first, the hatch opened and he went head first through the open hatch and disappeared!

Horror!

I don't know about Andrew but with me knowing Andrews family very well and it being my house, I saw MY life pass before my eyes !

Anyway by some miracle, instead of Andrew falling to his death with slot car in hand, his foot got trapped in the top of the ladder mechanics as it slid off the hatch and so he was left dangling in the air from the hatch by just his foot.

"I've got it" he cried, " can somebody pull me back up"?

Needless to say we awarded him the win

And I needed a very stiff drink

In my late teens four of us ran an F1 season for several years. We did the race on the Saturday morning of each actual race. We raced each other against stopwatches on both lanes of a two lane circuit which was mapped so it could be used each year.
The cars were lightly modified. The bodies were filed to allow axle movement vertically and we used the Scalextric supersoft rear tyres. (There were two compounds available). Run in on 'wet and dry' levelled the profile for more grip and the slight reduction in diameter increased acceleration. We had several years of serious competition doing this. It was great fun.

We also developed Waddington F1 game into a game with much bigger circuits on which you could run the whole GP grid.

I had a girlfriend in my late teens..

You were spoiled Dave! All I wanted as a child was a Scalextric set and a electric guitar. I was 28 when I got a guitar and 41 when I got a Scalextric set.
Like Steve SBM I discovered girls in between.

No one daughter was 3 months old having her scalextric.

So did I. I gave up slot car racing and married her. What a mistake that was. Divorce followed a slight disagreement where she got hold of her father's double barrelled shotgun.