Monday 22 October 2018

Slot Car Racing... Brands and Scales.

I've been thinking about this post for a while.
I know it will sound a little odd as some people understand that there are many different brands of Slot Car, in the UK we have always had Scalextric. That is the way we refer to Slot Car racing, It's Scalextric, since the 1950's it has been the known UK brand and that is what we use, we even refer to Carrera, Carrera Go, Ninco and many cheap makes or Brands as Scalextric. When I say cheap brands I mean the home race sets you find in the Entertainer or other High Street Toy Shops, Even Argos actually has it's own make of Slot Car Track. An we all call them Scalextric.

Just as we all call a Vacuum Cleaner a Hoover. Though a Hoover is actually a Brand Name not the name of the Cleaner.
(I'm not even sure of the spelling of the last bit.)

An now we move on to Scales.
Slot cars unlike trains have a slightly different scale setup, an I know a few of the train enthusiasts would be able to tell me all the difference between HO, O, N, gauge trains I myself don't actually know how these scales work I do though know how the slot car scales work. Like a lot of models they work on a 1/XX scale. So we shall deal with the scale.

Scalextric has two scales. 1/64 and 1/32.
The 1/64 is called micro and it s the tiny cars. This was designed to fir with one of the Hornby train scales. I think it is HO, I could be wrong though. The idea to be able to drive cars around your train layouts.

1/32 is what we see as normal scale.
A lot of companies make 1/32 scale cars and most of these will work on Scalextric track.

Carrera make three scales, 1/43, 1/32 and 1/24.
1/43 is used by several different companies it is a little larger then Scalextric Micro.
SCX in the UK also make 1/43 and several "own brand" slot cars tracks also use a 1/43 scale.
Speaking of SCX if you are in Spain as they are a Spanish company they use the Name Scalextric, and Hornby in Spain us the Name Superslot for the Scalextric cars over there. (There is a story behind this but it's not for this blog)

1/24 scale is generally raced on Wood, though Carrera Evolution track is designed for this scale as well. It is the wider track Carrera use for Both 1/32 and 1/24 cars in the Evolution sets.
Though Carrera 1/24 cars are normally digital and there is a whole new blog for that as well some where in my head.

Ninco, used to make 1/32 and 1/28 but since they stopped and started making slot cars again they are only doing the 1/32 scale at the moment.

Then there are everyone else and to find all the brands of cars in the world would take for ever, so I am hoping this helps with some of the questions I get asked about names and brands in the world of Slot Car racing.

So I hope this helps a bit about why we call everything scalextric when it is really all Slot Car Racing.