My brother got a neat "slot car" track for Christmas back in the mid 60s. It was a year or two before Hot Wheels came out (that was 67 or 68?) and THE toy cars to have were Matchbox . . . for those of you young folks, they were called Matchbox because they came in what looked like a matchbox . . . anyyway, back to my story, his "slot car" track used Matchbox cars. Each slot had a long continous spring down in the slots. On each side of the track was service station that housed a motor and gear that drug the spring through the slot. The track came with a bunch of plastic pins with a peel and stick base that you stuck on the bottom of your Matchbox cars. You set the cars on the track and the spring would drag the car around the track by the pin. When Hot Wheels came out, those suckers had no rolling resistance when compaired to Matchbox . . . and then we figured out that if you lubed it up with graphite, you could just about double the original speed. We used to take off one of the guardrails and see who could sling a Hot Wheel car the furtherest from the track when it hit the curve. It survived up until our earl teen years but it eventually just wore out and got trashed. We had a couple of real slot car tracks growing up, but the Matchbox track was alway my favorite because you could run any toy car you had on it . . . just had to put a pin on the bottom.
