Organised Chaos.

From the Collins Online Dictionary: 
Organised: “A number of people doing something together in a structured way.”
Chaos: “A state of complete disorder and confusion.”

Molesey’s RevoSlot Toyota Supra club cars made a return this week for their second outing of the year, and what an outing it was. The race was over 90 laps and, although your correspondent wasn’t counting and would have lost count anyway, the number of crashes must have been pretty close to the number of laps. Carnage doesn’t begin to describe the fun and games that dominated the early heats.

You have to hand it to RevoSlot. Their cars divide opinion in slotcar circles, but judged by the way they’ve survived two rounds of racing as Molesey’s hand-out class, they are at least tough. Not indestructible, mind, because just like the first event there were several delays while breakages were repaired, but sufficiently indestructible to remain usable for their next scheduled outing. (April 13th, should anyone fancy bringing a spectator. “It’s banger racing, darling. You’ll love it.“)

The evening had started well, thirteen drivers arriving to form the biggest grid seen at Molesey since March 31st last year. If you’re Julian, the poor guy who volunteered to maintain the cars in tip-top condition, or the club’s treasurer who has to sign off the repair bill, things went downhill thereafter, but for everyone else a lot of fun ensued.

Group 2’s first heat pretty much set the tone for their evening: crashes. Lots and lots and lots of them. The exception, in his first heat at least, was the Tomster, at sixteen the club’s youngest driver, butt of the greatest amount of mickey-taking (character-building, as the grizzled old guys like to describe it) and, when it comes to racing, arguably its most excitable.

When the Tomster’s not preoccupied with whatever it is that preoccupies teenage boys these days – the latest iPhone and which of the multitude of available genders they’ll choose to identify as, probably – and instead approaches his racing calmly, he’s capable of some excellent performances, as his first heat proved. Seeded to drive the yellow car/lane combination, by some margin the class’s slowest, he put in a stellar performance, the third-fastest yellow-lane heat of the evening and just two seconds slower than Julian who was quickest. Sadly Tom’s concentration waned as the evening wore on, Heat 5 being particularly dire and dropping him to the bottom of the midfield.

Heats 2 and 3 continued the crashes and chaos theme, so at what should have been the mid-race tea break, which was scrapped because so much time had been wasted with track calls, repairs and picking crashed cars up off the floor, Neil donned his chairman’s serious hat and delivered a “calm down and stop wrecking the cars” lecture to those who were struggling with the concept of driving without crashing. He needn’t have bothered, because in his next heat he shot his credibility to pieces when he crashed his car with such force that it somersaulted the barrier and hit the floor. Oh, how everyone else laughed…

By the time the final heat came around, the race control table had so many bits of broken car on it that it looked more akin to a scrapyard than it did race control, but at least the drivers seemed finally to have grasped the basics, because the heat was the most incident-free of them all. Not quite a miracle, but not far off.

What’s the chance that the next Club Cars race starts as calmly as this one finished? None, is my guess. Still, it was a damned good night’s racing!