Slot Cars

This is a hobby I've been involved with off and on since my early teen years. It all started with my uncle giving me a scratch-built 1/32 scale slot car (A 'Cheetah' body I believe) and a Cox thumb controller. I remember taking it to the local shop, called the "Pit Stop", which had three tracks... on the mezzanine was a large banked figure-8, and on the ground floor a small oval and a really large 'road-course' track called the "Engleman" (maybe the name of the track layout designer) which had an almost vertical bank curve at the end of the upper straight-away. I remember everything about this place even though it was more than 50 years ago I last raced there. Back then the slot car sport was still insanely popular and we had at least three shops in the city where I lived.

Unfortunately the sport is not nearly as popular as it was back then and my favorite shop, the Pit Stop, has long since closed. But slot car enthusiasts are still around and if you 'google' it you will still find a number of commercial slot car shops around (also a number of slot car related web sites), some as part of a larger hobby shop and some as stand-alone businesses run by those who managed to figure out a sustainable business model to support its continuation. There are also some track locations that are more like clubs than profitable businesses and these are usually run by aging enthusiasts that manage to find space in their garage or an existing main business to accommodate a large commercial track or two. There are even some clubs that run races on either plastic home tracks or home-constructed larger wooden tracks (seen a number of those on youtube). So the sport still lives and I believe has regained at least some of its earlier popularity by sticking to select rules based racing classes that keeps it more about skill than how much money you have to spend. Of course the main thing is to have FUN and learn alot in the process.

I have, over the years, kept most of the plastic track I managed to collect through various sources, some retail and some second hand. These tracks, even though normally only two lanes, are almost as much fun as racing on an 8-lane commercial track. I have HO scale (1/64th), 1/32 scale, and 1/24th scale plastic track, enough probably to cover the entire floor space of my house... but have only assembled a course and used them just occasionally. I think I like the 1/32 scale track the most because it allows for some pretty fast racing (without magnets), keeping just enough danger of de-slotting to make it interesting. I know it's just an individual preference thing... many people prefer HO because you can build a huge layout in very little space (and some of those tiny cars are INSANELY fast). The super quick ones DO require magnets to hold them to the track better though.
The plastic 1/24th scale track (Revelle is what I have) doesn't really seem to be 1/24th - even though you can fit two 4" wide cars side by side on a straight they wouldn't make it around any of the corners next to each other without one or both crowding the other out (I've tried!), and some of the 1/24th cars are way too fast and pull the track sections apart eventually. But these tracks do work really well for 1/32 scale cars though! I've raced the 'womp' style cars on my Revelle track and had bunches of fun!

Here's a 1/32 scale road-course I managed to fit onto a 4' X 8' sheet of plywood. I and my grandkids had great fun racing on this challenging little track until I had to break it down to move to another house a few years ago. It even has a banked main curve. The main trouble was keeping good electrical connections between track sections, as I'm sure you know if you've ever built one of these yourself. I use an old computer power supply to provide the 12 volts for racing. You just need to have one with enough current capacity for the cars you are using.
I have several hard plastic body cars for this track and these are available online (ebay or retail) for really reasonable cost. They are not quite as fast as what might be considered a 'commercial' 1/32 scale car (like a 'womp') so they are a bit easier to race on a track like this.
There is another kind of in-between scale (1/43) that you may have seen in a hobby store or two, or in someone's yard sale or something. These will also work on the 1/32 scale tracks and there is a little more room for them, but they don't seem to handle as well as the typical 1/32's do.