![]() ![]() ![]() Don stayed with the Scalextric Lotus Indy “powersledge” which he was convinced would give him the edge.īeing English, David was always promoting the English-ness of his Lotus 33. It was there we each bought our first upgrade from Scalextric equipment: I got a Monogram 1964 Ferrari and David bought the other car in the series – the Lotus 33. He drove us almost every weekend to the hobby-mecca of early 1970s Ottawa: Hobbyland. While visiting family in Britain, my grandfather took me for my first visit to Brands Hatch and then to fabled Tottenham Raceways where I saw my first Mura slot-car motor, which revved at 20,000 rpm!īack in Canada, my Dad did his part to feed our frenzy. Soon a third friend, Don, joined us and I had two competitors to worry about. David was often quicker and won more than his fair share of races. We did a bit of that, but didn’t go wild about it. You could buy buildings, figurines, signs, pit stop buildings, scoring towers and all sorts of things if you wanted to. With Scalextric, it was more modeling than pure racing. It was 1970 and, in the real world, race car builder Colin Chapman had just designed the Lotus 72 and aerodynamics and innovation was taking off and changing race cars forever. ![]() But I’d never given the sport much serious thought before and now I was soaking it all up like a sponge. I remember watching black-and-white television coverage of LeMans as a small boy in Scotland and playing with a fairly large 1950s Mercedes F1 toy car (with working steering!). It also opened my eyes to the real racing world. I loved the competition, I loved building our own cars, and most of all I loved trying to come up with new ideas to try and out-perform each other. Think of a seminal moment in your life that changed everything.įor me, one of those moments was when David pulled out his Scalextric slot car racing set: little electric projectiles that totally changed my life’s focus.įrom that moment on, I wanted to be a racing car driver. ![]() Check the overview for links to other posts in the series. One of a series of posts about the racing antics we got up to before arriving in competitive karting. ![]()
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