About Us
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Slot Car History
By the late 1930s, serious craftsmen/hobbyists were racing relatively large (1:16 to 1:18 scale) model cars, powered by small internal combustion engines, originally with spark-ignition, later with glow plug engines. The cars were clamped to a single center rail, or tethered from the center of a circular track, then they were started and let go for timed runs. In the 1940s, hobbyists in Britain began to experiment with controllable electric cars using hand-built motors and in the 1950s using the small model train motors that had become available. In 1954, the Southport Model Engineering Society in the U.K. was challenged by a patent-holder for using rail-guided gas-car exhibitions, as a replacement the members constructed an electric racecourse, a groundbreaking six-lane layout nearly 60 feet long for 1:32 rail-guided cars, which is widely considered to be the progenitor of electric rail- and slot-racing. In 1955–1956, several clubs in the U.K. and U.S., inspired by the Southport layout, were also racing electric cars guided by center rails, and soon after, by slots in the track surface. The term “slot car” was coined to differentiate these from the earlier “rail cars”. As the member-built club layouts proliferated, the relative advantages of rail and slot were debated for several years, but the obtrusive appearance of the rails and their blocking of the car’s rear wheels when sliding through corners were powerful disadvantages. New clubs increasingly chose the slot system. By 1963, even the pioneer rail-racing clubs had begun to switch to slots.
American hobbyists and manufacturers were adapting 1:24 car models to slots and British-American engineer Derek Brand developed a tiny vibrator motor small enough to power model cars roughly in scale with HO and OO electric trains. In 1959, Playcraft division of Mettoy produced these in the UK, and a year later, Aurora Plastics Corp. released HO vibrator sets with huge success in the USA. The tiny cars fascinated the public, and their cost and space requirements were better suited to the average consumer than the larger scales.
The slot car craze was largely a US phenomenon but, commercially, it was a huge one. In 1963, after a million and a half had been produced, Aurora replaced the trouble-prone vibrator cars with an innovative flat-commutator (“pancake”) motor, also created by Brand, and what is probably the best-selling slot car in history, the Aurora Thunderjet-500 was born. The Thunderjets and their improved versions, the AFX, sold in the tens of millions, completely dominating the HO market for almost a decade, until challenged by the Tyco cars in the early 1970s.
In the 1990s, computer design and methods of printing on 3-D objects helped create much more detailed and authentic models than the simple shapes and rudimentary graphics of the slot car boom. In addition, newly manufactured replicas of Aurora’s HO slot cars of the 1960s and 1970s appeared on the market and consumers gained the option of racing either the modern high-tech wondercars or the more basic designs of an earlier time. In 2004, the Digital Command Control (DCC) systems, which had revolutionized model railroading in the 1990s, began to appear in 1:32 slot cars, offering the ability to race multiple cars per lane with more realistic passing.
In 2012, Hong Kong Chinese inventor Mak Wing Kwong introduced the “Dynamic Motion Express” slot car system. The DMX track has a series of parallel slots, allowing drivers to choose lanes on the inside, middle or outside of the raceway, passing or blocking other racers. DMX slot cars have a rotating mechanism underneath each car with four pins that retract and protrude as the driver commands the car to move left or right. The car disengages its pin with one lane’s slot, moves to one side or the other, and reinserts a pin in the new lane’s slot.