Who put the X in Scalextric? The Rise and Fall of the Slot Car Craze

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Despite the withering of the years it takes very little tweaking of my childhood memory bank to recall the pre-computer age craze of slot car racing. Its heyday, at least for my generation, the decade of the 1960s, which in Australia coincided with the emergence of big shopping malls. Just about every large shopping centre or mall had a commercial outlet, a whole shop where you could go and race a hired 1/24 or 1/32 model race car (or if you were lucky enough to own your own racer) to your heart’s content at breakneck speeds around the hare-pin bends and high mounted banks of the circuitous race track…my personal haunt was in an out-of-the-way spot down in the basement of the Roselands shopping bonanza.

It seems my gut-feeling that the slot-car craze was the exclusive domain of the Sixties generation is vigorously challenged by various post-boomer respondents on the web who claim the phenomena for their particular “gen-dec”, especially the Seventies and the Eighties. Furthermore, Australia was not ground zero for slot-car racing (1912, England?), nor was it at the zenith of its popularity the epicentre of global slot car mania. That honour goes of course to the USA, the land of the automobile, the real thing on a 1/1 scale…here, the slot car fad among the young (and even those not so young) had its most seismic impact. The popularity of the pastime in America produced an absolute gold mine, yielding at its high-water mark annual sales of US$500 million. Not just race tracks in hobby shops and people’s homes, the number of commercial venues for racing exploded from just two public tracks in 1960 to around 3,000 operating by 1966.

Playland Racing Center, San Francisco, US, 1960s (credit: 

Jon Brenneis/The LIFE Images Collection/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

Slot car racing was a fad that inevitably went out of fashion (as is the wont of fads). There are several other, more tangible factors explaining its eclipse…as the competition on the mini-track hotted up, the high end of racing became high tech and high price. Thus, the average hobbyist player eventually got priced out and drifted away from the hobby; the increase in sales of home sets of slot car courses didn’t help the viability of the commercial operations; operators had high overheads, model scale race tracks require a large rental space to house them; the financial returns made by these businesses diminished, forcing more and more to go out of business, leading inexorably to wholesale closures of centres.

What happened to the endless sections of winding track when the slot car craze went kaput? Some of them ended up in museums and the warehouses of private collectors, there are particularly good collections apparently in LA in the Los Angeles Slot Car Museum and Bernard’s Slot Car Museum. 

In my research I was surprised to discover that  this rare beast, this most satisfying of vicarious juvenile pastimes of the 1960s “golden age”, has not entirely gone the way of the dinosaur. Today, there are still a few places where you can go to race—or just watch—a Scalextric or a Carrera Go model car…many call themselves “hobby shops” these days, such as the Penrith Slot Car and Hobby Centre in Jamisontown and Sloties in Charmhaven (both in NSW), and in the US there are pockets of them scattered around the country, still serving the competitive needs of rusted-on slot car tragics.