Home Slot Car Raceways Versus Comercial Raceways (part 2)

Over a year ago, one of the first editorials I wrote was on comparisons of home raceways and commercial raceways.  My brother, whose dementia is getting worse, didn't really see or agree with what I was saying at that time.  I am glad to say he has come out of his fog enough to learn a little on this subject though.  With my new interest in other scale racing, I have brought that article back up into the current topics area so it can be read in conjunction with this article.  I suggest, in fact, you stop reading this now to take time to read the first article.  It's okay, I will wait for you.

Now that you have either read the first article or just decided it wasn't worth the bother, I will continue.  At the time I wrote the first article on the topic I truly felt there must be a lot of home racing clubs out there that I didn't know about.  Twenty years ago I had internet friends in Europe who raced in this form.  They had clubs with several tracks involved and created circuits to race on going from one track to another.  I also saw this trend taking place in California and Texas and figured it would expand to the rest of the country if people wanted to race.  A year ago I was exposed to people who had 1/24 scale tracks at their homes with organized races on a regular basis.  I did not see the circuits of 1/24th scale tracks though.  Today, I still don't see the circuits in 1/24 scale.  It is a shame as right here in my home area there are three tracks within 5 hours of each other.  One of these tracks is a home track, Dungeon Raceway, but it is by no means a lesser track than the two commercial tracks.  There is very little similarity to the race program at any of these three tracks.  Dungeon (Prattville, AL) runs DTM, Flexi GT, and GoKart classes that neither of the other two tracks run.  Heart of Dixie (Talladega, AL) Runs Group F and occasionally Retro class cars which neither of the others run.  Charlie's Garage runs Super Modifieds and USRA LMP which the other two tracks do not run.  If these three tracks were to coordinate on their classes they could each benefit from the others racers coming to visit.

HO and 1/32 scale, on the other hand, have a lot more home raceways than commercial tracks.  The amount of work that has been put into many of these tracks is incredible and has inspired me (my track is still in the planning stage, but I have started purchasing the needed material).  If you go to facebook and do a search on HO scale slot cars you will find an almost unlimited amount of home tracks that are holding races.  You will find much the same with 1/32 scale, but it seems HO is like 1/32 on steroids.  Many of the facebook pages you will see reflect a group of tracks that race together.  They coordinate their race dates and the classes they run to make circuits.  You will find some HO home club circuits that have their races scheduled a year in advance.  Some of these slot car racing groups, associations, clubs have locations in not just one town but several.  A few of the racing associations I have looked at have racing in two or three states.

Lets face it, racing at a commercial raceway is fun, but when these home clubs are having more racers showing up to race than most of the commercial tracks, the scene of slot car racing is definitely shifting.  Let this serve as a call-out to one of the slot car racing associations.  I would like to have an article concerning your racing circuit, club, association, rules, racers, whatever.  Please contact me at slotsnewmonthly@gmail.com so I can get with you about this and we can share the info about your group here.