A long time ago in another world in the middle 1960s slot car racing hit Sydney with a vengeance and at its peak saw nearly 300 tracks in the metropolitan area. After a stretch of individual tracks putting on their own races in conflict with each other, the NSWMRRA produced a calender of racing so that people from one track could race on other tracks in a predictable manner, spread the business around and generally support the sport.
It was not without its risks as many track owners were willing to do more or less anything to see their own win at the expense of people who came from other tracks and one of the most popular tricks was in track preparation before the race. In the middle 60s most tracks were finished with white mironite non slip paint which had a satin silverfrost appearance when it was clean.
With practice you learnt how to deal with the trick that they played, the most common being to scrub the track squeaky clean the night before the race so that anyone who did not know the best tire choice for the track when it was clean went very poorly and had no chance of winning a race.
There were a few tricks around it if you put in the practice at the track beforehand, there was a hard rubber sponge tire available that would scrub ALL the residue from other tires off the track then you would pick through the available tires to see if anything worked when the track was clean, often Pactra tires would do the job as they were a hard rubber that was slightly greasy and would grip on clean mironite.
As sponge tires got better there were other tricks by testing different tire treatment methods that simply could not be detected which kept the dirt out of the tires so they worked better. By the time microcell tires became available, most of the remaining tracks refinished their tracks in a gloss surface and controlled the use of goo so that everyone could run their cars OK under reasonably even conditions.
The lesson was learnt but it took some years to learn it but in the mean time slot car racing died in the arse through bad management and lack of business knowhow and only a few remained in business to cater for the enthusiasts.
I retired from professional racing in 1971 and only bothered to come back for national sprints at Paramatta for a few more years until I ran out of interest and could not be bothered building the cars any longer.
I bother to do this meander down memory lane for a reason, to succeed in the 60s and early 70s you need to know every trick in the book, the rest of the tricks not in the book, undocumented extra tricks and those few that you would never tell anyone about as there was commercial interests involved and often good prizemoney for the big races.
We now live in a different world where slot car racing has just about hit the bottom and the old approach is just another case of flogging a dead horse and wondering why it does not get up and go again. Slot car tracks like any other business lives and dies on the number of people coming through the door and a new approach that caters for people is probably the only chance of ever seeing a revival.
Among many other approaches this is where retro racing comes into play, it is free of the massive costs of open and similar racing, the cars are so slow that ordinary people can actually watch them and without breaking the bank and requiring years of experience they can both own and drive cars of this type.
The catch is that to encourage this style of racing, it needs to be managed with some comprehension of what the attraction is to potential customers coming in the door and unless this is done properly the opportunity is lost and they go and do something else.
The easier the cars are to drive, the more people will race them and this means setting up the conditions that support cars of this type, reliable power, contact and traction makes the cars predictable and much easier to drive where rough tracks, lousy power and slippery conditions just turn paying customers off so they don't come back.
In particular retro racing has the potential to attract the older enthusiasts who have raced slot cars in the past as it is within the reach of most people in cost terms, especially those who knew how to build their own cars long ago. You can still get all of the K&S material as Dawn Trading are the agents who keep it in stock and the better hobby shops and at least some of the slot car tracks keep K&S products for hobbyists.
Now I may have wrinkled the nose of OZP... with some of my recent comments which is fair enough, I have had to listen to a reasonable amount of lip over the last 6 months or so so it is fair but it needs to be understood that I came as a friend who was willing to support the sport, help promote this style of racing and the tracks that cater for it, not as a patsy that marshals all night while listening to smartarse wisecracks.
Regards,
hutch at movsd dot com