Tortoises, Hares and a Dog.
What remained of the club’s RevoSlot Toyota Supras returned this week for their fourth race of the year. Given the carnage at the previous rounds, where casual spectators would have been forgiven for thinking that slot car racing is a destruction derby, it’s pretty impressive that anything at all remained of the cars, so the fact that the pink car still had an unbroken rear wing was not far short of a miracle, although it was the only car that did.
A pattern had now emerged showing which cars were the fastest, so an element of tortoise and hare (or hare and tortoise depending which car a driver raced first) had become part of the racing. Yellow car was the dog, no driver having yet managed to record his fastest race lap with it. Green car was statistically by far the quickest, so the race result was likely to be in doubt until the final few laps of the final heat. So it proved.
Heat 1 saw a blanket finish, Simon from Julian from David, the trio covered by just 0.29 seconds, Julian impressively hustling the yellow car around to produce its best drive of the night. Every subsequent driver hated the car, most pronouncing it a monster that wouldn’t negotiate right-handers without throwing itself at the barriers. Whether that’s actually true, or just another blame-the-tool excuse so beloved by those who struggle to wiggle their trigger fingers delicately, is open to debate. Probably the only people who know for sure about trigger-finger delicacy are the wives and girlfriends, but this being a pre-watershed publication, the questionnaire which they all so kindly and frankly answered has been deemed unsuitable for a family audience. Shame. Who’d have guessed that Simon liked that sort of thing? Or Dexter.
Heat 2 saw Julian pass Simon to head the leaderboard, then David grabbed top spot in Heat 3. It wasn’t to last. Julian had been drawn in the worst cars first, so with them out of the way his final three heats looked promising, but they didn’t turn out to be the easy run to victory that some had predicted.
Simon was almost three seconds behind Julian after Heat 4, but was slowly clawing his way back to the front. So hard was Julian trying that he uncharacteristically crashed in green lane, and by the end of Heat 5 Simon had narrowed the gap to 1.68 seconds, with the favoured green car/lane combo his for the final heat. He made the most of it, putting in a storming drive that was the quickest of the race, but it wasn’t quite quick enough, his final deficit to Julian a tiny 0.6 seconds. So near yet so far.
Astonishingly, the pink car still had an intact rear wing at the end of the race. What’s the chance of it remaining unbroken till the end of the year? Zero, if the dodgy trigger-finger technique described in those questionnaires is to be believed.
