One Myth Deserves Another

On Sunday, 20th August 2000, Brooklands, the birthplace of closed-circuit auto racing in England, hosted a meeting in honor of rail racing, the ancestor of slot racing which was also born in England. In fact, the day turned out to be a homage to all forms of slot racing, with a small 4-lane Ninco slot track and a portable "slot stox" routed wooden oval also joining the festivities.

I won't go into the details, because organizer Jeff Davies has already done that. But I would like to thank Jeff and everybody else on his team who worked like crazy to get this event up and running. Especially his children Richard and Jenny, who seemed to do all the work while Jeff was busy supervising. Now that's talent!

The day was, in a word, magic. I grew up in the early '60s reading about the development of rail and slot racing in England, and here it was in front of me, not just a reconstructed track and some of the real cars, but some of the real people! Charlie Fitzpatrick, owner of Betta & Classic, of course, along with his charming wife Margaret. Charlie was there "at the beginning" and was able to give Jeff invaluable aid on actually building the track, not to mention carving bodies and supplying parts. (I also sent all the documentation I could find on early rail track construction, including the American guys who obviously showed the Brits how to do it the right way!) I also had the honor of meeting Mac Pinches, another original rail racer, whose eyes nearly misted over as he recalled what it was like in the early days: everybody helping everybody else to get the bits and pieces you needed, because at the beginning if your car was able to make it a full lap around the track, you were overjoyed. A network developed to help people get parts, and a lot of international reply coupons wafted their way over the Atlantic from the first U.S. rail racers. In short, as Mac remembered with feeling, there was a real feeling of camaraderie among all the people in this new hobby!

Nothing was cut and dried; you had to make do with what you could find, adapt to the different tracks, figure out what pickup system would work, steal motors from toy trains and gears from old clocks, figure out how to make model wire wheels and drivers, etc. The rail track set up in the Chequered Flag room was also a good reminder of this: not too many of our cars worked well the first time around the track! It was no accident that the Bugatti Atlantic that Jeff had tuned won more than its share of races – the pickups are perhaps even more delicate on a rail racer than on a slot racer, and you had to spend a lot of time tinkering with them. Not to mention that my Napier-Railton, among other cars, refused to make it around the inner lane on the hairpin turn, except with a lot of hand-assisted power.... For those of you interested in building your own rail racer for next year's event, a reminder if you plan to use one of the old open frame motors: many of these 35-40 year old electric motors still work amazingly well, but they need a lot of running in! For the first half-hour my Pittman-powered Napier was going around the track at full throttle without falling off, but at the very end it was actually capable of enough speed to jump the rail. Hallelujah!

And if you are thinking of building your own rail racer, ask the experts (not me!). The standard of craftsmanship that I saw at Brooklands just absolutely bowled me over. The quality of work done on many of these cars was more than impressive – I hope this comes through in the photos that are published. I'm talking about machined chassis, carved balsa wood bodies, home-made ackermann steering, home-brewed motors, etc.

And although it was fun to run on the rail track, from every standpoint there's no comparison, slot tracks are better! Which makes it all the more incredible that they managed to survive for nearly ten years in Britain, until 1964, and that people seriously debated their merits in the letters column of Model Cars magazine. But it just goes to prove that once something is established, it's much harder to dislodge it. Witness the United States, where rail never got that established, and had pretty much disappeared by the early 60s.

One last word on the day at Brooklands, and this is a favorite subject of mine: coexistence! Without making a big deal out of it, Jeff managed to group a rail track, a modern Ninco plastic track, and a high-speed routed Slot Stox track in the same venue, and attract people who like slot racing in its infinite variety. I had expected to meet my fellow "nostalgia buffs", but I was very pleasantly surprised to see a contingent from the North London slot racing club, "hot shoes" who seemed to be just as fascinated by the older mechanically complex and realistic cars as the current semi-scale bullets. Actually, I was only half surprised, because I think that if you dig into any regular slot racing club (especially with members over 40), you'll find that a lot of them just like slot racing in any and all forms.

A word of congratulations to Ian Rivett and the other Slot Stox people, by the way. The races were very well run, the track was mounted quickly and worked well, and the racing was great fun!

In closing, I'd like to nominate one invention as the greatest advance in the last 45 odd years: the electronic lap counter! Counting the rail race laps by hand was amusing for a half-day, but I wouldn't want to make a habit of it!