When were slot cars invented?

Electric toy racing cars date back further, but the slot car as most people know it took off in the late 1950s. Scalextric was launched at the Harrogate toy fair in January 1957, although some sources date the first sets to 1956.

Who invented Scalextric?

Scalextric was created by Bertram 'Fred' Francis, who fitted electric motors to the Scalex tin cars his company Minimodels already made.

When was the slot car craze?

The 1960s. It was biggest in the United States, where towns had slot car centres with huge banked tracks. By the late 1970s the boom was over.

Is there a slot car video game?

Yes, we made one. Super Slot Car '98 is a roguelike deckbuilder slot car racer where you don't steer: you draft cards and your car drives the build. The first cup is free to play in your browser.

A short history of slot car racing

If you grew up in the UK at any point since the sixties, there’s a good chance you’ve knelt on a carpet next to a figure of eight of plastic track, thumb on a trigger, watching your car fly off at the same corner for the tenth time in a row.

Slot cars are one of those toys that never quite went away. Here’s where they came from.

The toy fair that started it

The slot car most of us know began with an engineer called Bertram “Fred” Francis. His company, Minimodels, already made little tin cars called Scalex. Francis had the idea of putting an electric motor in them and running them along a track with a slot down the middle, picking up power from metal strips beside it.

He called it Scalextric, a mash-up of Scalex and electric, and launched it at the Harrogate toy fair in January 1957. (Some sources put the first sets in 1956. Toy history is like that.)

Demand was huge, bigger than his factory could keep up with. In 1958 Francis sold Minimodels to Lines Brothers, the toy giant better known as Tri-ang, which had the factories to make it in volume.

The 1960s craze

Within a few years, slot cars had gone from a clever toy to a full-on craze, and it was biggest in America. Scalextric’s 1:32 cars and Aurora’s smaller “Model Motoring” sets were everywhere, alongside makers like Tyco and Revell.

By the middle of the decade, plenty of American towns had a slot car centre, where you could bring your own car and race it on enormous banked tracks. By one estimate, at its height the hobby was worth around $500 million a year in the US alone, with some 3,000 commercial tracks.

Then, almost as quickly, it faded. By the late 1970s the boom was over and most of the racing centres had shut.

Back on the carpet

In Britain, though, slot cars settled in for the long haul. Scalextric changed hands again in 1968 when Hornby bought it, and it kept appearing under Christmas trees for decades. In the 2000s it even went digital.

That’s the version a lot of us remember: not the American racing centres, but a box under the tree, a track that took up the whole living room floor, and a car with exactly one setting, which was flat out until it wasn’t.

Why we turned it into a deckbuilder

Super Slot Car ‘98 is our love letter to all of that. But we kept noticing something about real slot cars: you don’t really steer them. You choose how fast to go, and the track does the rest.

So in our game, you don’t steer at all. The race drops into slow motion, you draft a card (more engine, nitro, a dirty trick, scrap plating) and your toy car drives that build for you. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder on a slot car track, with three cups, twelve races, 124 cards and rivals who hold grudges.

The best bit is that it feels just like the carpet. A car built for pure speed still flies off on the first tight bend. It’s just that now, it’s your deck’s fault.

The first cup is free to play in your browser at superslotcar.com.