Whence This Love for Model Cars? Part FINAL: The Thrill of Motoring On Your Tabletop!

Because I am a history fanatic, I’ve done my homework on the history of slot cars. There are numerous online resources for this, and some of the details are murky; some of the accounts conflict and some are, only naturally, angled with nationalistic bias. Even so, its really quite amazing; they go back much farther than you might imagine! It appears that the first toys we could rightly call slot cars were made shortly before World War I, by none other than Lionel!

But it wasn’t until the 1950’s that a British company called Playcraft patented what we could recognize as the first HO(ish)-scale electric slot cars…and that’s when we started getting some real action in our scale models! It was Playcraft that first coined the term “Model Motoring,” but when Aurora swooped in around 1960 and struck a deal with the British firm to make a similar product under the same name, the golden era of the slot car was launched! As many of you know, the first Aurora slot cars were the “Vibrators” which sure looked cool, but had their problems. All that was to change with the introduction of the Thunderjet chassis design late in 1963, and here we are, exactly 60 years later, still racing them! As car designs go, only the VW Bug lasted longer…and whether a VW Bug is more fun to drive than a Thunderjet may be debatable!

In retrospect, I find it somewhat odd that it took me until almost the age of 50 to become a true “slot-head”…and its odd because, as a kid, I had slot car sets! I got my first one-a Tyco Pro set-at the age of 6 or 7, and I had a Matchbox Speedtrack around the age of 9. The explanation for this is two-fold: first, I love metal; slot cars were plastic, which dulled the appeal to me. But to my boyhood eyes, the main thing about slot cars that turned me off comes back to form; the slot cars always looked “fake” to me; the body designs, in order to conform to the set wheelbases, always looked more like caricatures of the real cars rather than models. This might have been a very different story if I were 10 years older and had been raised in the age of the T-Jet, but by the time I came along it was AFX and Tyco in the stores, and although there are a few visually pleasing bodies in both series, a lot of them always seemed “malproportioned” to me. The visual beauty-the joys of the form that I’ve described-was a major part of my love for model cars, and the slot cars of my 1970’s childhood always seemed to fall short in this area.

This is the reason why learning about T-Jets as an adult was such a revelation to me; when I discovered the Model Motoring bodies of the early 2000’s and how good they looked, it caused me to take another look at the originals as well, and it was then that it dawned on me that, while I still love my die-casts, I had indeed been missing something. Once I realized that a model car that looked that good also had its own motive power, I was hooked! Hey, what can I say? I’m a slow learner!

Your T-Jets can’t take you to the grocery store; they can’t haul a load of bricks home from Ace Hardware or fetch the kids from school; you need the real thing for that. But you sure can “drive” a T-Jet, and I’d wager to say they take more skill to operate than the real thing! You can learn a lot racing slot cars: setup, strategy, handling & competition all play a role in success; the skills needed to enjoy them are surprisingly varied, yet simple to learn the basics of; and you can always challenge yourself-and your friends-to improve! In the process, you learn a lot about physics, and more than a little about patience! Make no mistake, they can be frustrating too; sometimes they’ll disappoint you and even piss you off. In all these respects, there are elements of the real thing!

To me, the biggest appeal of slot cars is that each one has its own individual motor, with its own characteristics. Each one needs a small, manageable amount of care and maintenance, which almost anyone can learn the basics of and, again, like racing them, you can get better and better at with experience. There’s something very thrilling about having this kind of animation, this kind of agency, along with the pleasing forms and colors of model cars. Makers of video games and computer games coined the term “interactive” years ago, yet no matter how interactive a video game is, it’s never going to give you the interactivity of the physical world!

So with a Thunderjet, you get the kinetics: the motion, the thrill, the skill; and you still have those beautiful colors and forms you also get in well-designed model cars that are not independently powered…and on top of that, they are easier to customize and improve than a die-cast…and you get all this in addition to childhood nostalgia! Taking all this into account, how could any gearhead not love slot cars? They’re not a substitute for the real thing, but they are a great augmentation!

Car lovers all over the world have a lot of challenges ahead, but isn’t it nice to know that when the going gets tough, you can always de-stress by running your T-Jets around your track, either with a few friends or on your own? It works for me! If you’re reading this, it probably works for you, too…and if you’re just thinking about it, give it a try; you’ll be amazed at the joy these little cars can bring you!

So then…the Christmas season of 2023 marked the 60^th birthday of the Thunderjet and the “fabulous pancake motor!” God Bless you, Aurora Plastics Corporation of New York, and all your founders and progeny, for giving the whole world 60 years of affordable model motoring joy! Here’s hoping for 60 more!