Who Put Those Corners There?
You don’t need to be a genius to work out that slot car racing is a rather simple pastime. Bung an electric 12-volt motor in a ready-made plastic chassis, add two gears (technical terms: ‘the small one’ and ‘the big one’), two axles, four wheels, four tyres, a guide blade and brushes, a bearing or two, a few bits of wire, a screw here and there, a couple of drops of oil and cover the whole lot with a colourful ready-made plastic body and, hey presto, you’ve got a race-winning machine. Easier still, you can avoid even that by buying a ready-to-run almost-race-winning machine. Simples. Except, as Molesey’s GT class shows, it isn’t.
Why isn’t it simples? Because things are complicated by the need for drivers to wield tools. Not the nice warm bendy tools they take delight in playing with when nobody’s looking, but contraptions made of metal and plastic with funny sounding technical names like screwdriver, axe and angle-grinder. (top tip: angle-winder and angle-grinder aren’t the same thing)
To complicate things even further, these cars are raced on a track, which requires drivers to understand two principles: speeding up and slowing down. That part would be quite simple too, were it not for things called corners. Corners, contrary things that they are, keep jumping out of nowhere and surprising drivers. The corners that cause the greatest problems are those that hide at the end of straights. Time after time drivers are merrily whizzing along a straight, happy as Larry, when all of sudden there’s an almighty commotion as another of those effing corners jumps out and reduces a car or two to its component parts.
And so it was this week, when the assembled drivers brought out their Molesey GTs. The ‘hit it with a hammer’ assembly phase passed without note, the scrutineer satisfied that every car complied with some of the rules. Unbelievably, some complied with them all, so the racing phase was allowed to begin.
Some – Josh and Julian – immediately grasped the basics and proceeded to dominate the racing. Others – Ed, David, Simon – came close but succumbed to a few lapses of concentration and paid the price, while a few more were still being persecuted by the marauding gang of corners.
Still, it was all good fun, the track call button had a thorough workout and the racing was actually quite close in places – special mention to Tom, Steve, Martin and visitor Jeremy who swapped places repeatedly, never finishing a heat in the same order and ending the evening separated by just over one lap.
Who said corners ruin racing?
