- For kids of all ages with money to burn, may we interest you in some incredibly detailed 1:32 scale custom slot car tracks?
- Slot Mods Racing has produced many of the real world inspired slot car tracks, but the company’s latest brings along The Blues Brothers, Animal House, Mad Magazineand other pop culture icons to the small stage.
- These custom tracks start at $75,000 and come with hand-built tracks, scenery and people, and six cars to race.
Some people have all the fun. One such person turns out to be David Beattie, the founder of Slot Mods Racing, a company that hand-builds custom 1:32 scale wooden race tracks. We’ve featured his modified slot car tracks before, but his latest creation deserves a fresh look.
Normal—if we can use the word—Slot Mods Raceways tracks are designed to mimic the look and feel of real racetracks. The team calls these Custom Scenic Megatracks and has created, for example, a 10-foot diameter Pebble Beach racetrack and a 9-by-15-foot Lotman Laguna racetrack. Due to space limitations, the scale versions of actual tracks that Slot Mods create are “built to the ‘spirit’ rather than being a perfect replica,” the company said. The latest Slot Mods track couldn’t be modeled on anything that exists in the real world and instead takes inspiration from a dive deep into decades-old pop culture.
This new track, called the Mad Cave Raceway, combines famous movie scenes, including the float parade which is funny. Animal house and references to The Blues Brothers next to billboards for Mad Magazine and Spy vs Spy. Beattie posted on LinkedIn that Evil Knievel and John Belushi also appear. A childhood delight is now contained in a model lock car universe. Some people have all the fun.
Slot Mods’ Custom Scenic Megatracks don’t come cheap, with custom builds starting at $75,000. The final price is based on size, complexity and scenic elements, and if that’s too rich for your blood, the company offers a six-by-12-foot Standard Scenic Raceway basic offering starting at $50,000. If you just want to focus on racing slot cars and not so much on the landscape they race in, Slot Mods offers a four-by-eight-foot flatpack Origins Series racetrack.
But the real fun here is in the (admittedly expensive) customization. While the standard Megatrack components – including cars, scenery and buildings – are built to a 1:32 scale, 1:24 scale cars can also be used. Each Megatrack comes standard with hand-painted wooden tracks, as well as “period-correct stands, structures, signs and advertising banners, aluminum Armco rail, hand-carved and painted landscaping, shrubs and trees, lap timing system and computer tablet, slot motor controls, variable power supply, LED base lighting and six lock cars,” according to the company’s FAQ. You can also add external LCD monitors, tablet PC controllers and POV in-car cameras.
The Mad Cave Raceway proves that the FAQ needs at least one update. The page currently says Slot Mods would like to be able to offer custom slot cars in the future, but we can’t help but notice that the scale Cake Float car zips between Ray’s Music Exchange and signs showing Alfred E. Neuman. good times
Contributing Editor
Sebastian Blanco has been writing about electric vehicles, hybrids and hydrogen cars since 2006. His articles and car reviews appeared in the New York Times, Automotive News, Reuters, SAE, Autoblog, InsideEVs, Trucks.com, Car Talk and other outlets. His first green car media event was the launch of the Tesla Roadster, and since then he has followed the shift away from petrol-powered vehicles and discovered the new technology’s importance not only to the car industry, but to the world as a whole. . Throw in the recent shift to autonomous vehicles, and there are more interesting changes happening now than most people can wrap their heads around. You can find him on Twitter or, on good days, behind the wheel of a new EV.
