Spin-Out on the Slots

The air shimmers with tension in the crowded room. All eyes are focused on the action at the tables. The players hunch over the board, sweating with strain; and when they leave, whether in victory or defeat, their hands shake for minutes.

Is this some glittering casino, where fortunes change hands on the turn of a card, sending dinner-jacketed bankrupts out onto the beach to blow their brains out? Far from it. This is the U.S.'s latest mania: slot-car racing.

Slot-car racing seems to have been invented in England, but it might have been made to order for the U.S. market. Model builders and tinkerers have almost unlimited scope for fiddling the hours away with a tool kit; automobile buffs can at last possess that low-slung Ferrari or that hot-rod Model A (or both); will-to-winners can frazzle their adrenals with high-test competition, and Walter Mittys can pocketa-pocketa to a screaming finish in the Grand Prix without risk of fracturing their spectacles.

Way of Life. A slot car is a plastic scale model of a real car. It runs on a slotted track. A fin under the nose of the car fits into the slot but does not lock there--nothing but the car's weight keeps it in place. Power is provided by electric current picked up by brushes that run along the metal strips flanking the slot. Race tracks have from four to six slots running parallel, each connected to a rheostat to enable the "driver" to control the car's speed. Herein lies the skill; going into a turn too fast will result in a "spin-out," as it does in a real car.

Cars are made in several scales; most popular is 1 to 24. Speeds scale accordingly; 15 m.p.h. on the 1/24 scale is the equivalent of about 300 m.p.h. In slot-car drag races, where there are no curves and speed is the only criterion, the little cars can accelerate to as much as 600 m.p.h. scale speed, creating the aerodynamic problem of how to keep them from becoming airborne.

Such speeds were made possible by the invention in the early '30s of an aluminum-nickel-cobalt alloy known commercially as alnico, which has magnetic properties that enable the cars' tiny motors to rev up to as much as a staggering 25,000 r.p.m. They buzzed over from England to the U.S. about ten years ago, but only in the last year or so have they moved out of the hobby shops and the subteen set to become a full-scale way of life. Epicenter of the new wave is California, where there are now about 300 slot shops, as the racing centers are called, and in the San Francisco area alone, there are at least nine tournaments every weekend. Just in the past year, 20 new tracks have opened in Phoenix, 25 in Chicago. The East has yet to feel the full impact, but without doubt it impends.

Verisimilitude Buffs. Basically there are two kinds of tracks--those that emphasize speed, which tend to be simple ovals, and those that go in for elaborate verisimilitude to real auto racing. This includes elaborate landscaping, grandstands filled with spectators in highly individualized attitudes, pit mechanics, starters, news photographers and such-plus gadgets to imitate the scream of an engine or to cause a simulated blowout in an opponent's car. One of the more sophisticated of these is a device that simulates a car's change in weight as its gasoline is used up by feeding more current to it with a timing device, then cutting off the current entirely when it "runs out of gas." The verisimilitude fanatics often insist on carefully modeled drivers in their carefully scaled Jaguars, Cobras, Aston-Martins, etc. On 24-hour endurance runs, the lights may be turned off during the night hours, forcing "drivers" to rely on their tiny cars' tiny headlights.

Tracks can have any layout at all; most popular length is 220 feet in twisty figure-eight over-and-under designs, which have the advantage of equalizing inside and outside lanes--though the outside lane on a slot track is not much of a disadvantage because the exceedingly spin-prone cars can take a wide curve much faster than a tight one.

Scratch & Spreads. The slot-shop craze may well turn out to be as pandemic as miniature golf. The Bank of America reports that, in California at least, the little cars are outselling that old standby, the electric train. Youngsters can rent cars in most of the racing centers until they have saved up the $6 to $8 to buy their own, or build themselves a "scratch" model from about $6 to $10 worth of materials. The mechanically minded have almost unlimited scope for improving the breed --rewinding coils and changing brushes to soup up their engines, boring holes to lighten chassis, testing new tire compositions and designs to increase traction. And oldsters with money to indulge themselves can buy their own layouts for installation in the basement, working toward the kind of spread that used to be the preserve of the model railroaders.

For young and old with racing in their blood, the stakes are already high. International Model Racing Society has offered $28,000 in awards for Grand National and International tournaments to be held this year, and American Model Car Raceways Inc. is offering a whopping $100,000 in prizes for teams composed of one person under 14, one under 21, one over 21, and a female of any age.

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