Streaking Back At 1,560 Mph

On the same weekend that Emerson Fittipaldi won this year's Indianapolis 500, an international gathering of Fittipaldi-wannabes congregated at Grand Raceway in Chicago to compete for another racing title. These drivers had cars that cost only $500 but accelerated from zero to 60 mph in less than a second and hit speeds equivalent to 1,560 mph (more on that later). The work done in the pits seemed more like microsurgery than auto mechanics.

Welcome to the 1989 Slot Car World Championships, in which 280 drivers from 27 countries competed for $55,000 in prize money (more on that later). The world championships were bankrolled by Jean Pierre van Rossem, an eccentric Belgian financier. Van Rossem, 44, was slot car racing's sugar daddy for the past four years and one reason that the sport regained popularity.

He also has created quite a stir. On the one hand, van Rossem is determined to protect slot car racing's traditions from the onslaught of high-tech tampering. On the other, he promotes the sport with all the subtlety of Wrestlemania. Suffice it to say that slot car racing is alive and well, but not what it used to be.

Twenty years ago, slot cars were all the rage, and every town big enough to have a traffic light seemed to have a track. One company alone, American Raceways, built 5,000 mini-Indys in storefronts and malls. The Wall Street Journal estimated that sales of slot cars and parts reached $50 million in 1966. "Then in 1968 there was a tremendous crash," says Ken McDowell, whose company, Parma International, has manufactured slot cars since '68. "The sport's growth was just too phenomenal to maintain."

"I compare it to Hula-Hoops," says Dan De Bella, who owns Pro Slot, another surviving manufacturer of cars and parts. "As with so many fads, the market got oversaturated, and people got sick of slot cars."

Today, there are roughly 500 commercial tracks and 30,000 racers nationwide. But they are not just neighborhood kids. These days, "drivers" are adults fluent in techno-speak with money to burn. "I probably have about seven or eight thousand dollars worth of slot car parts back in my hotel room," said Gary Puetz, a product supervisor for Mobil Chemicals in Chicago. Puetz holds the single-lap record of 2.070 seconds on Grand Raceway's six-turn, 155-foot banked course. "Here I am, almost 40 years old, and I'm still playing with toy cars," says John Myers, an advertising executive who spent his 15th wedding anniversary competing in the worlds.

Grand Raceway, which is in a shopping center 25 minutes west of the Loop, boasts that it is the world's fastest track. Brightly painted cars whine with the sound of dentists' drills as they shoot around the wildly twisting circuit. The leaders are listed on a computer screen that's mounted overhead.

The fastest cars travel at about 65 mph. "That may not sound fast," says Stuart Koford of Addison, Ill., who won this year's world title and the $5,000 first prize. "But keep in mind that these cars are one twenty-fourth scale. In full-scale terms the cars are traveling at 1,560 miles per hour. These cars pull 10 G's. Not scale-10 G's, real 10 G's. The space shuttle at takeoff pulls 10 G's."

Koford runs Koford Engineering, which designs slot cars and does consulting work for the Defense Department. "We just finished investigating the causes of electrical failures in aircraft for the Air Force," says Koford. "Our next project is finding an insulating material for night-vision glasses."

Is it odd that a slot car designer should also design some defense systems? "It's all high-tech," says Koford. "Everything is simulated on computers." And what's the biggest difference? "When we make a slot car prototype," says Koford, "our investment is only a couple of thousand."