Slot car insanity?

[Mayberryman]

[BIG E]

waytoomuch...

While running a weekly wing car race on the same American "Hillclimb" I described earlier, we also had a blood bath incident. Gerry, my racing team partner was slightly color blind, so he would always marshall the 180 that runs inside the big banked turn. The Hillclimb has the two crossovers, so he knew where the lanes were on that corner. We also wrote the lane colors on the stickers with a Sharpie to avoid more color confusion. For safety's sake, I believe by then the USRA mandated that small strips of cloth tape be folded over the leading edge of the side air dams. Most guys chose colors that matched the paint jobs or helped in identifying their cars while on the track.

As it turns out, he was waiting to come in next heat on the red lane, and was standing at the exit of the big bank. For some reason, he tried to help out the marshall with a car that had jumped the 180 and ended up on the bank right in the way of full throttle cars. I should have called "track" right then, but this all happened so fast... I was working the 180 degree "deadman" turn after the exit of the bank, and had a full view of this happening about 20 ft. in front of me, directly in my line of sight. Before I could shout "NOOO!", he put had put his hand down on the bank to support himself and retrieved the de-slotted car with the other hand. A split second later, one of the wing cars came around the bank and the heavy plastic diaplane on the leading edge of the body sliced his finger open right to the bone! Track call, red flag, and out came the Coleman Fuel to clean the blood off the track, while the rest of us were trying to get the bleeding under control. I don't think the two of us finished racing that day, and I may have taken him to the nearby ER, I don't remember.

Needless to say, he never put his hand on a "hot" track surface again, even if we were only running Womps! This was in the mid 1970s, and those wing cars were not the flyweight things they are to day. Ahh, if only he had a pair of Kevlar gloves to wear back then!
Gerry eventually gave up slot car racing, and went auto crossing with his brother running a Lotus Europa and a Porshe 914. Last I heard they had sold those two toys and went in together to buy a 1/1 scale glider with trailer. Haven't seen him in years, and I wonder if he still has that box of Aurora T-Jet, A/FX and G Plus cars that we used to race at my house. I'd like to buy them if I can!

I'll never forget that bloody day on the Hillclimb, though. -- Ernie :>)