![]() Though most fit the stereotype - older white men wearing shorts and sandals - the crowd was a mix of men and women, young and old, with several races and many occupations represented. “All my friends come over, and we drink and drive,” Farr-Jones said. On a recent Saturday afternoon, he and 30 club members were sipping beers between practice laps and getting ready to race. ![]() The FarrOut club, based in Farr-Jones’ Glendale garage, is one of the area’s largest. “But the only problem is, see, that they keep dropping off.”Īs public racetracks have gone out of business, and as the internet has made online shopping for slot cars and parts easier, slot car fans have formed clubs to support racers and host competitions. “I’ve got a regular base of guys 50 and older,” said Debby Watterson, who with husband Jim owns the Orange County facility, where hobbyists pay $7.50 to race their cars for a half-hour. They and their customers say the client base is graying fast. Today, there are only two in Southern California: Orange County’s Buena Park Raceway and Santa Clarita’s Wright Slot Car Raceway. Fewer than 200 tracks were still in business by 1975, and gradually most of those closed, too. “There weren’t enough minutes in the day to sell.”īy the early 1970s, slot car centers - like the once-prevalent ice-skating rinks, bowling alleys, pool halls and miniature golf courses that also required a large real estate footprint - were folding. “The multipliers didn’t work out,” said Stephen Farr-Jones, a lifelong racer and founder of the private FarrOut Slot Car Club. “As a result, I never got my bar mitzvah.”Īs the fad peaked and then waned, slot car businesses found themselves unable to turn a profit charging teenagers small amounts of money to use their large tracks. “I was ditching Hebrew school when I was 12 years old when I wandered into a hobby shop in West Covina,” Shorer said. Kids like Shorer began frequenting tracks where, for only a few dollars, they could spend hours racing with their pals. Manufacturers Scalextric, Revell, Aurora, Carrera and Tyco were together selling $500 million worth of cars and equipment a year. By the mid-’60s, there were more than 3,000 public race tracks in the U.S. Slot car racing was born in the early 1900s, but the hobby languished until the 1950s, when English entrepreneurs began to build electrified tracks and controllable scale-model cars to race on them.
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