Slot Car Racing

As a child, if I had a favourite toy it would have had to be Scalextric, the slot car racing set. I started off with one of the smaller sets, a figure of 8 with some banking and a couple of rally Minis to race around. This was gradually enhanced as I managed to beg, borrow or (more usually) buy extra bits of track. Eventually, I managed to get up to a fully operational 4 track circuit which would, on occasion, be changed to a very long two track set with a fiendishly long strait that would run the full length of the hallway before returning to the living room. All of this prevented my mother from Hoovering which drove her batty.

For his 11th birthday, my middle son decided to spend his birthday money on a similar (but presumably much cheaper) set. This features the familiar figure of eight circuit but with the addition of a loop-the-loop. I’m actually surprised that he went for this as electronic games consoles seem to be the standard these days but I’m rather pleased that he has gone for something more old-school.

However, the first thing that I had forgotten about these is just quite how long it takes to set the whole thing up. It didn’t look that complicated but it took nearly 2 hours to assemble everything up to the point that the cars, modelled on the Mario Bros characters, could be raced around. I think it was at this point that I discovered an interesting difference with the old Scalextric set. With Scalextric, if you go too fast, the cars fly off the track. With the loop-the-loop, if you don’t go fast enough on the Mario set, the cars drop off.

Anyway, much fun was had although I also recalled another feature of the old Scalextric sets. For every 10 minutes of racing there seems to be another 5 minutes of straightening out the contact brushes. You don’t get that with console games…