Slot car racing, once thought to be on life support due to the emergence of newer technology, never really went away, but it’s being resurrected better than ever this fall. And for that fans can thank the new NASCAR product line from Carrera, a longtime maker of slot car racing toys for children of many ages.
In business for more than 60 years, Carrera had a brief stint in the world of NASCAR during the early 2010s before turning its focus to product lines featuring other types of motorsports. All that changed in the fall of 2023, however, when the company – which is headquartered in Austria but has offices in the United States – entered into a licensing agreement with NASCAR.
Frank Tiessen, who became the CEO of Carrera Revell of Americas Inc. in May 2021 and is also the company’s president since April 2019, considered the move a no-brainer.
“For a U.S. company that’s in racing, it doesn’t make sense not to have NASCAR,” Tiessen said. “We can do as much Formula 1 and DTM and GT cars as we want to, but we see from our pre-orders that we’ve had on the books since we made it public that we have NASCAR, NASCAR is outselling – by far – everything else that we have. We have never seen numbers like these.”
Miniature vehicles that are powered by a small electric motor and perfectly fitted to navigate a custom-designed toy race track, slot cars of various shapes and sizes have been around since the early 1900s. At the height of its popularity, slot car racing was so prominent in the United States that even late-night talk show host Johnny Carson took notice.
“At one point there were over 23,000 slot car racing venues in the U.S.,” Tiessen said. “One of my favorite stories is always that actually the slot car racing national championship was on the Johnny Carson Show in 1963 and the winner got a real-life Ford Thunderbird, and the winner was a 13-year-old kid. His parents must have been so proud of him.”
Eventually, as hand-held devices became more prevalent, slot car racing wasn’t as widely practiced. But with the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which extended well into 2021, many people who once had a strong affinity for slot cars returned to their former hobby while stuck inside the house with little to do.
“Slot car racing was less prevalent because video games came out, but we definitely have seen a huge resurgence in the last couple of years where slot car racing has made a comeback,” Tiessen said. “It’s not to the level where it was in the 1960s, no, but it’s back again. I think the pandemic helped a little bit with that, because people were locked up and home and thinking about, ‘What can we do and what did we do when were little?’
“And parents – it’s mostly dads – remembered that and got back into it, but then they took their kids with them. They took their kids and grandkids and introduced them to slot car racing. I think that is a beautiful thing.”
In a world where people old, young and in-between typically spend hours a day looking at a screen, slot car racing offers an opportunity for more interaction and community-building.
“Playing video games is a very solitary experience,” Tiessen said. “Slot car racing brings people together, and you have something physical you can touch. It’s bringing families and friends together. People are coming together again and playing together.”
Carrera, the world’s leading slot car racing brand, has always been on the cutting edge of innovation and technology, and its new NASCAR product line, now available for purchase, is no exception.
The company has a diverse range of NASCAR offerings, which you can explore in-depth at carrera-revell-toys.com. Carrera’s toy vehicles are suitable for children of various ages and skill sets, and they come at different price points. While the NASCAR slot cars available from Carrera this year are highly detailed miniature replicas of the Hendrick Motorsports vehicles driven in the NASCAR Cup Series by teammates Chase Elliott, William Byron, Alex Bowman and Kyle Larson, the racing sets that come with the cars aren’t patterned after any particular NASCAR track or style of track.
“We tried that in the past with what we called ‘vintage’ NASCAR cars,” Tiessen said. “We tried that and offered that, and the feedback from the consumers was always, ‘Yeah, it looks nice and we know what you’re trying to do … but no.’”
No matter the configuration of the sets, the slot car racing experience can be as educational as it is fun and entertaining.
“You learn the basics of physics about speed, about downforce, about gravity,” Tiessen said. “These are things you take with you out of slot car racing. So kids will learn how to handle a controller. It’s a little bit about hand-eye coordination also: ‘I have to slow down, I have to speed up, I cannot go that fast through a turn.’
“With slot car racing, you get something out of it.”
