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Playground Racers

Image of Terry Smith TERRY SMITH looks back to his youth and playground fun.

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Some of you who know me personally will be aware of my almost lifelong attraction to slot car racing which I took up aged ten, but this wasn’t the first involvement with miniature car racing. In my last year of primary school, so I guess I was around six, some boys brought some Dinky cars to school and started ‘racing’ them across the playground. What fun I thought and went to speak to the lads, who showed me their cars, which were mostly the Grand Prix cars that Dinky manufactured in the mid-1950’s. Sadly I didn’t have any of these chunky looking and even then, rather dated looking models, and as I was leaving soon to go to Junior school, I didn’t get involved.

One of the Dinky racing cars I distinctly remember from my primary school days was this 232 Alfa Romeo Racing car. This one was being advertised recently in excellent condition in original box. The vender was asking for £115.

Dinky released this Set in 1955 and featured, from Left to Right, a Cooper-Bristol, an Alfa Romeo, a Ferrari, a HKW and a Maserati. Mint boxed sets like this are now worth in excess of £1500.

I had been at what is now known as middle school in some parts of the UK for a while, when 'whoosh' a shiny Corgi car raced across the slightly downhill playground, somehow managing to avoid the kids playing football with a tennis ball, and others re-enacting WWII air battles! I tracked the kid down to find it was a Corgi model of a Chevrolet Impala, of which I owned one myself, and told him that I would bring mine in the next day. The next day came along, and I took my Corgi car into school and boy did we have fun.

Another car that I remember the boys racing was this Ferrari. Not that I knew what a Ferrari was back then but for its blue and yellow paint work. No one could predict their value 60 years on.

However, if one can live without the box and what is best described in tatty (or played with) condition this Talbot-Lago can be yours today for £30.

The model Chevrolet was based on what was known as the ‘Gull Wing’ Impala and was extremely wide and low and came fitted with the Corgi rudimentary suspension system of sprung steel placed over the axles. This gave the car a smooth ride compared to solid axled cars and with its width it rarely toppled over. The other kids, who were either getting fed up trying to kick a tiny tennis ball or pretending to be a Spitfire or a Messerschmitt, decided to join in until we had around 10-12 playground race car drivers.

New school and a new dawn as we ‘raced’ low wide cars like this Impala. Of course, once purchased and knocked about it makes survivors like this very scarce today.

This model is being described as New Old Stock and is offered at a cool £295. This rear view shows off why the ’59 Impala was known as the ‘Gull Wing’.

I then hit on the idea that instead of sending the little cars aimlessly across the tarmac why not one of us be ‘it’ and turn it into a game of car tag. That meant that whoever was ‘it’ could track down and corner one of his opponents and by slamming their car into the other, that car and its owner would then become the chaser. This led to our own playground modifications taking place which included oiling the axles with 3-in-1 oil to taking out the glass and vac-formed interior so you could fill the car with added weight. One enterprising young man even chopped the roof off of his Impala so he could ram as much ballast as he could which was a mixture of lead shot and Plasticine, not that you could get away doing that these days. As I moved up to senior school aged 11, I soon realised that playing with Corgi cars in the playground was not the done thing and sadly I left my School Racer days behind. I look back at those days fondly but do wonder how big my collection could have been if i had continued collecting and not turned my attention to slot cars.

This is more like the look of our playground racers. Kids did try other models, but this type of Chevy was always the king of the playground!

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