Hobbies: 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.