Matchbox Speedtrack Revisited, PART I – Plastic Into Zamak: The Oddities of Lesney’s Final Days

There are instances where my voluminous memory of my childhood fails me. I know I can remember an abnormal amount of detail about the things I owned and the things I did and experienced going all the way back to when I was very young-in some cases as young as 3 years old-because I have had a great many of these memories confirmed either by my parents or older relatives, or in some cases by old photographs. Yet there are some cases where things just “go dark.” This is somewhat unsettling, giving me almost a sense of having a form of amnesia, and one of the things that most frustrates me is that I cannot remember what became of my Matchbox Speedtrack.

The set I had was the most common one, the “Race And Chase.” I can distinctly remember getting it for X-mas of 1980: I can remember opening the box on X-mas morning in the living room of the house I lived in at the time. I can remember playing with it in my bedroom. I have discovered via the web that there are some variations on the box art design as the same set was made for many years and sold all over the world, but again, I can remember with crystal clarity the exact one I had…

In addition to the cop car and the vaguely Malaisey-compact-looking funny car that I took to be a Chevy Monza, I remember two other Speedtrack cars I had that I got separately from the set: a blue and orange Porsche turbo, and a dark blue and yellow Fiat Abarth.

What I simply can not remember for the life of me is what happened to that racing set! The only trace of it that remains is the crushed and destroyed body of that Porsche, and the chassis pan that I assume was part of it. Why these pieces are still floating around in an old shoebox in my basement is as big of a mystery as how they got to be this way, as well as the fate of the other cars. It’s very strange: its a true puzzler to me, like a sequence out of Hitchcock’s 1945 classic Spellbound.

This mystery has a post-script from just a few years later, which is quite interesting. The 1982/83 Matchbox catalog is-to put it bluntly-strange. I can remember getting it at a Kay Bee Toys at the Montclair Plaza when it was first released, and poring over every page marking all the cars I wanted, as I did with every Matchbox catalog every year, and thinking that this time around, something seemed…”off” somehow. Today, we know that some of the cars photographed in that catalog were pre-production resin models; for instance, the Pontiac Firebird was shown in a color scheme that, to my knowledge, it was never made in, and in that photo, you can somehow tell that you’re looking at a picture of a resin model and not a 1:64 die-cast car. The same goes for the ‘57 Thunderbird, which is shown with a rear wheel well style and overall proportions slightly different from the final release. But look closely, and you’ll see another anomaly: two cars pictured are actually Speedtrack slot cars! Or actually, slot trucks…the Bandag Bandit and the Superboss. The reason for this is that these were originally Speedtrack slot cars that were later remade into die-casts.

Collectors will recall that these were the final days of Lesney; after the company was run into the ground by mismanagement after founder Jack Odell retired, they were in bankruptcy court and looking for a buyer. The production of the toys in this period must have been extremely chaotic, because these anomalies you can see in the 1982/83 catalog had never been seen before.

What’s even more interesting is that a sharp eye can tell that the Bandag Bandit and Superboss, released in those final days as series #65 and 66 respectively (although sadly these last Lesneys dropped the series number from the baseplate text), were not the only Speedtrack slot cars that were given new life as die-casts! There’s another one. Can you pick it out?

I’ve never met anyone who knows enough about the conversations in the board rooms during Lesney’s last days who can confirm my theory about what happened here-I’m still holding out hope that someday I will meet a man or woman who played the role of that “fly on the wall” who can fill in the blanks for me. So, here is my theory: desperate to roll out new products to keep vendor’s interest and sales closing even as the company fell apart, and finding themselves coming up short on designs due to a lack of money for personnel and equipment, someone got the idea to repurpose some molds for the company’s only then recently defunct slot cars and reissue them as die-casts.

In case you’ve never picked up on this: the 3^rd car from the Matchbox 1982/83 die-cast lineup that originally started life as a slot car is the Fiat Abarth! Take a look at this car and compare it to the other Matchboxes of the time and you can see immediately that it is way out of proportion to the other cars: it’s much too big, its scale being nowhere near 1:64. Its bigger than most of the trucks released in the 1-75 line that year (with the exception of its 2 former slot companions).

The history of this particular casting is scrambled even in the die-cast portion of its life, as it was originally scheduled to be released as #74 in the 1-75 series, and a handful of them actually did escape the factory that way, in the very last picture boxes made before the company cheapened them down to the crappy generic solid-yellow boxes with the model name and number stamped on the flaps instead of printed. These picture boxes for this car bearing the #74 are extremely rare and valuable today (although they have been reproduced-collectors beware!). By the time the US catalog was printed, however, the car had been reordered to occupy #9 in the lineup, which is how I bought it…in one of those crummy generic yellow boxes.

If you ever get a chance to take a look at the Speedtrack Fiat Abarth and the die-cast version side-by-side, you will see it is overall the same mold. There are some subtle changes to the design, but these changes were likely made to address the differences required by working with molded plastic as opposed to a poured zamak casting. Perhaps a whole new die needed to be created out of the original mold; if that’s the case, it seems like they could have chosen that part of the process to shrink it down on a pantograph to reduce its size, but again, if they were just rushing to get product out before the receivers locked the factory doors, they probably just did what they thought was fastest…and cheapest.

I remember when I first bought this car, it was a let-down; though I still have the very first copy I got at the age of 11, I remember thinking that although I liked the look of the car, I was very disappointed by how out of scale it looked compared to all my other cars. And at that age, I also knew that it was a metal re-cast of the original plastic slot car, because even though the slot version I had was gone, I had owned it at one time and I remembered it. I knew what they had done, and I thought it was cheating. I still think that!

These were sad days for toy car collectors: some of the last Lesneys were pretty nice, but many had plastic baseplates and details that felt cheap and rushed, and the new owners Universal Toys initially put out poor quality junk for a few years before they seemed to finally get their bearings, improving fit and finish and beginning to introduce some much nicer new castings around 1986 (after moving all the manufacturing to Asia, of course). The Speedtrack and Powertrack line of toys, however, died out with the Lesney brand.

The Fiat Abarth casting continued to be made for many more years in many different colors, always in that ungainly size larger than almost every other model in the 1-75 series; no thought appeared ever to have been given to “correcting” the scale.

There is some question in my mind about one more die-cast released as a new model in the 1982 lineup, the BMW M1 which occupied #52 in the series. This car is also quite large, although not quite as out of proportion-at least to the eye-as the Fiat. There was a Powertrack LaneChanger molding of the BMW M1, and although I’ve never seen or inspected one in person, it wouldn’t surprise me if this, too, was modied to become a zamak die, and served as the basis for the die-cast version!

The Fiat Abarth, the Bandag Bandit, and the Superboss remain oddities from those swansong days at Lesney, and looking at them today, I believe I understand why, as a child, I wasn’t more excited about the Matchbox slot cars than I was: they were incompatible with my die-cast collection, because they were too big. Its a little ironic that the world’s foremost name in 1:64 die-cast cars made a line of slot cars bigger than their other toys; seems to me like it would have been an advantage to Matchbox to make their slot cars along the scale of Aurora Thunderjets, to “blend in” with the die-casts. Why didn’t they? Could it be because the electric motor and chassis design had to be a certain scale to manufacture reliably and economically, necessitating this scale closer to 1:55 or 1:50? Or could it have been a deliberate decision; is it possible that they wanted the slot car line to stand out as a distinctly separate line of toys?

I hope someday I’ll find the answers to these burning questions, but we may never know. I do feel, though, that this accounts for my “amnesia” over the fate of my own Matchbox Speedtrack: non-plussed by the incompatibility with my ever growing armada of die-cast cars, childhood me probably just lost interest in the slot cars…and the set and cars probably just disappeared at a garage sale or, possibly, even into the trash during one of mom’s whirlwood “room cleaning attacks” while I was at school. All but that Porsche turbo, which appears to have been deliberately destroyed, though I don’t remember doing it.

But this is not the end of the story, dear readers! Your humble blogger has been doing a little homework on the history of the Matchbox Powertrack and Speedtrack line of toys, and the more I learn, the more interested I’m getting.

Is it possible that a whole new chapter is about to begin at DRAG CITY? Stay tuned for Part II and we’ll take a look even further back at the original toys that gave birth to these die-casts!