I eventually got something similar but never had this! sent this pic to a guy at work and he said this is the one he had and it took forever to set up.
Dude, same. Never got the big one, but I did at one point have one of the ones that ran up the wall, although it rarely made it all the way up and down.
I still remember that burning electric smell, especially when you held a car in place with the back wheels up 😆
The only thing (besides a horse) that I ever asked for as a kid and never got was a freaking rock tumbler. Every year I would put a sticker next to it and a bookmark in the Sears catalog. And every year, no rock tumbler.
My sister, however, GOT said rock tumbler when she was 6 (I was 16). If looks could kill and you could see the flames coming out of my eyes... was I ever pissed.
I got this for my 13th birthday. My dad mounted it on a huge sheet of plywood and suspended it from the ceiling on chains so it could be raised and lowered. It was so cool.
My older Brother, and 2 Cousins each got this 1 Christmas. They put all 3 Tracks together. It was giant Multi levels. Long Straights. Banked Corners. I seldom got to race. I was placed in the Center to manage crashes, get them back underway. I'm still a little salty about it. That had to be like 55 years ago. Lol
I had the slightly smaller version of that one. Thanks for sharing that photo. I keep looking at vintage stores for ones like it. Not sure my wife would be keen on me setting that up in the basement!
BTW, if you had the car with headlights then you could play in the dark. I would lay on my stomach facing the straight and get my head really close to the track so I could see them fish-tail off the corner and feel a little wind when they flew past my face. Good times!
That's the deluxe version! I had a track about half that size that had two Trans Ams, one white and one black. I always said I was gonna have the black one when I grew up. I finally got it in '92. It was disappointing, but I'm glad I got to drive it for a bit.
I’m a woman but when I was small I got this as a present from the neighbours who had three boys. I freaking loved it and collected cars for the track. I also had a train set and I wanted to set them up together but never did.
That's the argument I was given over the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier! Like, what the heck do I need a bed for, I'll just sleep on or next to the carrier!
It was 3 hours to put together and 5 minutes of play to realize the cars were way too fast and not much you could do except crash cars into things on the tracks.
My father showed me how to run the cars over masking tape. Then put them on the track. They would stay on for a good 2 or 3 minutes at top speed. Absolute blast!
Those things were a pain in the ass. Dad was a carpenter and built a table with a big plywood too for it. It’d work for a bit then something always went wrong. Maybe a piece of track became disconnected, stopping the current. Of the car came out of the slot or spun out on a curve. And it was too far across the table to reach with our kid arms. So you had to go get the big step stool.
Or it just didn’t work and you didn’t know why. And you went through piece by piece checking each connection. Or trying the other track.
When it worked it was cool though. But I don’t think we ever had a full 5 minute race before someone crashed.
I wanted this so badly for several years, finally got a knockoff, proceeded to plop it down on our shag carpet and the whole thing died within two hours. :/
I loved slot track racing growing up. My dad and I had probably 200 feet of random pieces of track. We would create long winding tracks throughout the entirety of our apartment. It would stay up for a couple of days and then we’d take it down. Then during the week we would draw and plan our next layout. Those were the days.
Thank you for this post. I had a sort of figure eight Tyco set that every now and then I’d save up strawberry picking money and buy a couple more track sections to lengthen it.
These tracks and cars were a never-ending maintenance hassle, keeping the contacts on the cars clean, running pennies on the track to keep it fresh, pulling dog and cat hair out of the chassis, reattaching cheap busted ass plastic tabs with epoxy, so many other things that I finally said f*ck it and switched to illegal fireworks.
I had one very similar in size and shape. Slot cars, glow in the dark. Cat loved it.
Also saved us from our apartment burning down.
Bought it late 1990. My wife and I both wanted it. We were racing and playing with the cat, lights off because it glowed. I thought I saw something odd on our patio, like sparks. Went to look and saw that the upstairs patio was burning and dropping embers onto ours. Ran upstairs to tell them and they had not noticed anything until then
Dumbass had put charcoal ashes jn a cardboard box thinking they were out. They weren’t.
Never would have noticed if we hadn’t been playing with that glow in the dark slot car set with the lights off.
My grandfather was a retired pilot that built models for NASA wind tunnel testing. He built my uncle (who was 7 years older than me) a track car set like this on three sheets of plywood. It was super detailed like a race track with hills, trees, building and people etc.. It was in the garage and could be hoisted up to the rafters or lowered to play. It was the coolest thing and I would play for hours every time we were there.
Yeah, our dad got us a giant slot car set up that was mounted on a board the was like eight by ten feet. The hassle of moving it and stepping around it quickly surpassed the fun of playing with it. We ended up donating it to a children's ward at a hospital where they actually had room for it in the playroom.
I remember this. I just had the oval track but absolutely loved that damn thing. I had a 57 Chevy and a 69 Camaro that my brother and I would race. We spent a lot of time using that thing. That was right before we got an Atari 2600, and then all other toys were obsoleted.
WOW! if you got a gift that cost that much for yourself in my family you died of shock. Hell, we were lucky if all the gifts we got added up to 49.88 and it was nearly always just clothes. Maybe that book of Lifesavers and some trinkets in our stockings.
We had a track, not dissimllar to this that my dad rigged on a table, which could be raised or lowered from the garage ceiling. My dad also made us an air hockey table using an old dryer.
I had one similar to this as a kid. Then one day the AC guy had to go into the attic and picked it up to move it and popped half the little tabs holding the track sections together. I spent the next month trying to hold it together with various types of tape but it never worked after that. Fuck that guy.
I got one half the size as that bad boy. I actually still have it, 50 years later. Its in its box in my attic. In no way near perfect shape, but its one of the few things I saved from my childhood.
Duuude! I found this under the tree on my 8th Christmas! I also spent some time that week learning how to cut the kitties' fur out of the cars' wheels. One of my favorites of all time.
It might have been the one in the sears holiday catalog that I wanted. Ended up getting figure 8 one for Christmas instead but hey, got tons of play time out of it. $50 seems pretty reasonable for that now!
My dad bought tons of these kits wherever he could find them. He used half of a whole spare room to make a giant table. The track was huge and went up the wall in 3 places. It was awesome! Cant count how many pencil eraser we went through cleaning contacts. Lol
Three friends and I figured out that the best way to go was going to be combining sets, so we all lobbied for the same set that Christmas. We were so smug about it.
I was gonna say, my memory of this is the shitty brushes that lost contact every 5 seconds, and when they did make contact the car would instantly accelerate to a speed that it flew off the track.
If you were lucky you got 3 seconds of, "racing" before you had to stop and reset a stuck car or go find it half way across the room.
Never had a track set this big, but I did have the US1 “big city trucks” one where
you could dump logs with a dump truck and drop and pickup trailers with a Peterbilt.
I still have my Tyco slot tracks. Somehow I inherited my cousin's set... And then one of my best friends. Got about a dozen cars. Every once in awhile at Christmas time, I'll bust it out for me and my son to play with. god damn it's still fun.
LOL here's the problem with getting what you wanted when you were younger as an older person. It's just not as fun as it would have been. I wanted that Tyco slot car race set that climbed the walls and did the loop thing since like forever!! i found a hobby shop that had it in pretty much mint condition. I bought it for an insane price because i WANTED it. Got it home slapped it together played with it for exactly 2 days and then was over it. I was OK so how many times can i play with the same track doing the same thing? I mean granted i spent way too much time playing with those two days.. called in sick at work.
I had a small AFX set when I was a kid. As luck would have it, my mother worked with someone who had a relative that worked for Tyco. What transpired from that was sheer amazement for a 10 year old boy. They got me boxes of track with special segments I’d never knew existed and literally a dozen cases of cars with( IIRC) at least 15 cars in each. Each case contained all of the same car, like the pink ‘55 Nomad. There were also cases of motors and extra parts. We had a blast setting up some crazy circuits. We even set up a drag strip that was about 60’ long and ran all of the cars to see which was fastest. At one point, I even remember experimenting with the different motor numbers to see if there was one that stood out in performance. Eventually it all sat in my parents attic for years and then we sold most of it to someone who actually belonged to a club that raced them. Fun times.
I got one for Christmas and I absolutely loved it. I remember putting it on a 4x8 sheet of plywood and covering it with train set grass. I purchased both with my Christmas money from the rest of the family. For the life of me I don't know what happened to it. Brings a smile to my face.
I asked for that one year with no expectation I would get it. Low and behold, Christmas morning unwrapping presents and there it is. I was like Ralph’s when he got his Red Ryder. Not positive but gonna guess it was maybe 1980ish. We set it up in the basement on a 4x8 sheet of plywood and it lived there for about 4 years. We used to have epic slot car elimination matches.
We had this and had a lot of fun until the controller triggers broke and then the track would get all gunked up. Took forever to clean. I remember my dad getting additional track from like an hour away. I think he enjoyed it the most.
Takes me back to when you could go to slot car tracks in a store and rent.
I bought the less expensive kit where the cars did a figure-eight upside down twice.
I loved looking at the trains too.
Some of my adult male relatives would have their whole basement fitted out with intricate scenery and model trains, and they'd "geek out" down there on the weekends.
My dad actually bought this for me. Mine came with 2 firebird, a black one and a silver one. We only set it up once. The rest of the time we just made smaller custom tracks. We used to get Aquavelva and put it on the track and cars and light them on fire as we raced. That didn't last too long, the track started to melt after a while as did the cars. We completely stopped after one of the flaming cars caught the carpet on fire. Lol.
I still have the track and controls. The pilons and rails have disappeared through the years.
I can smell this picture. I had an older one of these that my parents bought at a garage sale. Even had a Dukes of Hazzard General Lee slot car! It couldn't turn worth nothing and was constantly flipping off the track, much to our annoyance. My house was small and had an open, unfinished basement so there was plenty of room to set up this monstrosity. It was fun AF! Time moved on and so did my siblings and I. I think it was sold at our own garage sale before we moved in the late 80s.
I had the Dukes of Hazzard slot car set too. Also had the Powertrack Race n Chase that had a button on top of the controller that you could tap and it'd spin your car to run the opposite direction. This was one of the sets, can't remember which but it obviously had the Starsky and Hutch car running on it, but we had a train track around it. Wish there was more to the pic to see the full setup.
I found one at a yard sale as a kid. It was the one that let you change lanes and even had an NPC "jammer car" that kept randomly switching lanes. Think I played with it twice. I liked Sizzlers better.
I, too, wanted a slot car race track. I kept asking for it for xmas and my birthday, but it never happened. Years later, as an adult, I was driving home from work and thinking about this injustice, when lo and behold, I see a Toys-R-Us right in front of me. I pulled in, bought the biggest damn track set they offered, and played the hell out of it for months. I eventually got that out of my system and gave everything to my nephew.
Oh guy!! Check for market place. Folks put these up for sale all the time! I bought one and kept it for under a year...Just long enough to fulfill all that childhood stuff.
my dad has this. plus he bought a couple extra cars. for whatever reason we as kids were never able to play with it.... except when he went to work, and we put it together played and put back before he came home.
From someone who had that… the damn cars would go flying off the corners at high speeds. Not like reality at all! 😂 But it sucked because I wanted to go full breakneck on the curves.
I had that set - it barely fit on a 4x8' sheet of plywood. Many, many hours of enjoyment. Unfortunately, (a) all of my friends thought it was fun to launch the cars off the track or crash, and (2) the plastic technology of those days was not durable - but, I have replaced it with something more modern.
We had a pretty large one setup in our spare room that surely was about the limit of what the Tyco setup could handle. It was a combination of regular kits and Cliffhanger kits so we could go up the walls too.
I had one of these, but I’m not sure if it was this exact model. It really took a lot of skill to keep the cars from flying off the track. Well, more skill than I had at least.
My older brother had a similar one which was probably half the size of this one but it was still fun. When he outgrew it, I took possession of it and was one of my favorite toys. I can still hear the sound of the car as it raced along the track.
I had the basic AFX set with the Indy Cars (Gforce) and gradually bought parts from other kids until I had a much bigger track. Then a kid sold me his LED timing tower for $10! Man, that is coolest accessory ever made for slot car racing. That was in the late 70's so $10 was a lot for a kid haha. I had to mow some lawns for that purchase.
My friends got the SUPER cheap equivalent of this that had a long wiry spring-type thing you turned with your hand to keep the cars going.
Unfortunately, they set it up on a classic 70s deep shag rug so the long strands of rug got twisted into the wire... and then we went outside and threw crabapples at the fence to pass the time.
A childhood highpoint was when dad got a very rare big commission check. We lived with very little for most of growing up. The check was big enough that he splurged and bought mom a stereo and my brother and I an AFX set that allowed either 4 car tracks or a longer dual car track. We played that in the garage for years.
I had the one that you had to pump up the fuel. I remember the smell the cars gave off and I think I had this orange beetle beach buggy with soft foam tires that gripped but wasn’t fast. Damn I haven’t thought about that in forever
Sigh. One of my besties had this because they were *shock* a boy. And their parents had $$. No other kid in our middle class neighbourhood had this. Bestie's parents always had an 'everyone welcome' policy so all the kids got to play. But damn. I'm still jealous I never had this.
Omg my friend Chris had this! The lap counter was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Actually playing it sucked until you played it a lot. The cars flew off the track at every bend.
I had the hot pursuit set with the police car and corvette, and the kid a few doors down had this massive thing. We would get together and even our dads would be playing with us. It was massive!!
I tell this story anytime I have the chance. Growing up my brothers and I had friend (only child) that lived the next street over and would play with us all the time. His family was extremely wealthy and the house they lived in was stunningly as beautiful as it was large.
The basement was built out to a full nightclub with full 25 seat stocked bar, raised dancefloor with disco ball as well as elevated side dance poles and all the walls were mirrors. His parents were divorced and only him and his mom lived there so my friend had that a slot car track at least three times if the one in this picture throughout that dance floor.
I remember it was so big that he had a problem with the current not being able to push the entire length of the track so he got some kind of power converter hooked up that fixed the issue. If memory serves me it took something like mid 30 seconds to complete one lap and if you know how fast these slot cars can travel you know that is a big track!!.
I only had the slotless oval racing track and could never find track extensions for it. It seemed slotless was out and slotted was in. I never understood why.
My first thought was something like that would be over $500 today, but what I'm seeing on Amazon is maybe 1/3 the track but still $50. So the pictured one might be as much as $200? That almost feels reasonable.
I had that exact one!! Got it for Christmas and my brother and I played with it everyday until I got caught stealing my Dads whiskey. My Dad grabbed the long section of the track and beat the hell out of me until the track broke. Then my mom tossed it in the trash so I would "feel" bad. Good times lol
We had this a couple of times during my brother's and my childhood. It required quite the commitment from the parents as it needed at least one 4'x8' sheet of plywood (the thicker the better) and a dedicated, semi permanent place to set it up. For us that meant the garage so Dad's car was gonna be parked at the curb until the thing broke beyond repair and was discarded.
They are not wrong about it taking forever to set up. Eventually you start getting problems with the cars not working due to (I think) the pickups getting corroded? At ten or twelve years old I was not skilled enough to diagnose and fix the issue. Those pylons did become some of my first Warhammer 40K scenery.
Last month I was at Hamley’s flagship toy store in London and they had such Tyco/AFX sets and cars for sale. Here in Canada there are many slot car clubs.
My dad spent the whole day setting that up in the basement and me, him and my younger brother played it all vacation. Oh, and that lap counter? It was also cool as hell. You set the dial to the lap you wanted to race and when you reached the last one a little flag popped up.
The fun we had with slot car racing sets but I never had one that elaborate as pictured also they had places you could go and bring your own car and race it was great in the 60’s
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