![]() It was like driving a car with only a gas pedal and no steering wheel or brakes.īy 1968, the vast majority of arcade tracks had closed and the future was speeding past. Slot-cars promised the fantasy of high-speed racing, but, frankly, all you could do was squeeze a trigger. ![]() It’s no mystery why: The gameplay was so limited, it got boring fast, even for kids. About the same time as Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were racing slot-cars on Batman in 1967, the craze overheated. ![]() John was so taken with the little model cars that he is reported to have bought twenty sets.”įor a car-crazed country, slot-car sets were a fast, brash, electric miniature that pulled stock-car racing out of your television and onto your carpet. “A Scalextric electric model racing car set accompanied the Beatles on their 1964 British tour and was always set up backstage. Much of John Lennon’s attic was “devoted entirely to John’s model racing car track,” biographer Barry Miles writes. Even Presley’s pop rivals The Beatles - Beep beep beep beep yeah - were addicted. The hobby’s mix of train-model enthusiasm, garage-tinkering, and high-speed competition wasn’t quite a Hula-Hoop sensation, but it came close: Ed Sullivan hosted celebrity races on his show. The track was so enormous, the King had to wall off his pool patio and devote an entire room at Graceland to racing tiny cars. If so, her plan worked better than she could have anticipated: Just a couple weeks later, in mid-January, Elvis spent $4,990 ($36,883, adjusted for inflation) to upgrade to a custom-built, massive “Highspeed Raceway Road America” set. Elvis and his Memphis Mafia pals (who’d given him a life-size statue of Jesus on Christmas that year) were racing cars with a religious fervor at the local “Robert E. Organizers bragged that cars hit Formula-1 top speeds, albeit at 1/24 scale.īy giving Elvis that racing set, Priscilla may have actually been trying to get the King to spend more time in Graceland. Too fast? The car would fly off the track. Hobbyists would bring their own cars, line them up in electrified slots on huge, room-sized tracks, and use a radically simple trigger to control the current absorbed by the cars’ tiny engines. As many as 3,000 public slot-car tracks sprung up, like arcades, in the 1960’s. Slot-cars weren’t just toys kids played with at home.
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