I love my toy racing cars, but I think they’re ruining my dating life
By Karl Quinn
“Whatever you do,” a well-meaning friend advised me recently, “do not show that to any woman you might be trying to impress.”
Sage advice, perhaps, but the offending object is so big I’m not sure how I can keep it hidden. It’s there right inside my front door, all 2400mm x 1200mm of it. The Scalextric. A bloody great slot-car racing set. I should get rid of it, if only to enhance my dating prospects. But I really can’t.
A Mini Cooper in the foreground, and in the background a Ford Cortina Mk I (a car the author once owned in real life).Credit: Karl Quinn
I bought it – or some of it – about 25 years ago, after my first marriage ended, and I had set up house in a flat in East St Kilda. My son lived with me part of the time. The Bathurst set was for him.
Well, that was the story, anyway. In truth, it was for us, something we could play together and bond over. And we did. But if I’m really honest, it was also – and maybe mostly – for me.
You see, I’d really wanted a Scalextric set as a kid. I ended up with an Aurora AFX set instead. Not the worst outcome in the world, I grant you, but it was like wishing for a mountain bike and getting a tricycle.
Scalextric, which was launched in 1957, is the grandaddy of slot-car sets. The cars are bigger, 1/32nd scale versus the AFX’s 1/72nd. They hug the tracks better, drive better, are less prone to flying off at great speed, hitting the wall and disintegrating (though try hard enough and all this is still possible). Perhaps most importantly, the metal pins that connect lengths of track (and allow the electricity to flow, which in turn powers the cars) were more robust. In short, Scalextric was the bee’s knees.
When I repartnered, the Scalextric came with me. When we had kids, it came out of the cupboard. As they grew old enough to be interested, I bought more track, more cars, a lap timer. One day, I promised, I might even let them play it.
I designed a track layout with loops and a chicane and a bridge, and affixed it to a large sheet of plywood. I hung that sheet off a piano hinge attached to the wall, with a set of foldaway legs tucked underneath so that the whole thing could be pulled out and up and be ready to play in a matter of minutes. It was a thing of beauty.
The kids loved it. Friends loved it. I loved it. But my wife did not love it. When we separated a couple of years ago, I didn’t take a lot of stuff with me. But the Scalextric, she insisted, had to go.
For the past year, it’s been leaning up against the hallway wall in my new home. There’s a white-painted sheet of MDF over the top of it, so no one really notices it unless I point it out. But I notice it, every day. “Use it or lose it,” it screams at me. I pretend not to hear.
She loves me, she loves me slot...Credit: Karl Quinn
Like so many of the objects we (or I) clutter our lives with, it is more than just a thing. It’s a repository of memories. It says something about me, and to me. And to anyone else who cares to notice.
Maybe that’s reason enough to hold on to it. That Scalextric isn’t just a slot-car set anymore. It’s a Rorschach test.
What do you see when you look at it? A sentimentalist who loves his kids and the good times they shared? A hoarder? A middle-aged man with a chronic case of arrested development? Or maybe, as some architects I know suggested, a thing so oddly beautiful that it should be displayed high up on the wall, like a massive piece of plastic and metal art.
Perhaps my well-meaning friend is mistaken. Maybe I should make sure that any woman I’m trying to impress does see it.
After all, if they can get past the Scalextric, we might just be off to the races.
Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.