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BARRY BOOR'S ALTERNATIVE |
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Isn't it amazing what some people do for a hobby? |
WARNING:
If you are not a fanatical and committed slot-racer, be very careful how far you venture into this site. I will not be held responsible for any physical or mental deterioration which occurs to anyone venturing into these pages.... You do so at your own risk....
| MAJOR UPDATE: Following a suggestion from a fellow slot fan, Frank Verplanken from Nice, I have begun to enter the results of ALL the races I have been involved in since the very beginning of my slot racing hobby - 1962. If you can bear the pain of looking at them, go to my World Champions page and simply click on the year link. On the evening of Sunday 2nd December 2007, I completed the last season listing. (There are a couple of sets of missing times from 1998 and I must search for those, but otherwise, everything is complete.) Thanks to Frank for persuading me to undertake this task..... On 13th September 2008 I added a new results page. This shows the results of the 1958 Formula 2 races I am now running. Check the page out here.
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I was staggered to see that the first race I ran in the Avgas Series was over 18 months ago, on June 10th 2006. Although I have shown the new cars as I have produced them in the box near the top of the page, I had not opened a new page to show all the cars together so, to see the cars from that series, please click here.
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LATEST CAR NEWS Updated 01.05.09 Six Ferraris to add to the 1950-51 series. The four with coloured noses are the regular works cars for Ascari (blue), Gonzales (yellow), Villoresi (white) and Taruffi (green). The dark green car is the Thinwall Special while the plain red car will be used by various odd bods.
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LATEST RACE - updated 25.06.09 KENTISH '100' - Brands Hatch
Heat 1 was dominated by Allison's Lotus - with Cliff and team-mate Graham Hill using the new type 16 for the first time in F.2. He led virtually all the way but was unable to break clear of Moss who came in second just 4.4 seconds behind. Roy Salvadori had a steady race to 3rd but was 18 seconds behind Moss, with Trintignant, Hill and Henry Taylor filling out the top six. An early retirement was Jack Brabham, which did take a little of the interest away from the race as did the demise of pole-sitter Ian Burgess, who ran off the track with a stuck throttle entering Kidney Bend on lap 23. The race had been run at a speed which saw virtually all the runners lapping quicker than their best practice times, but this did not prepare us for what happened in Heat 2. The track warmed up considerably on a very hot day and when Heat 2 began it became obvious that anyone unable to go considerably faster than in Heat 1 was going to be in big trouble. The conditions seemed to play into the hands of the Cooper drivers who found their cars holding on much better, especially through the never-ending right-hand bend of Clearways. Having come through to 4th from the back of the grid in Heat 1, Maurice Trintignant, in Rob Walker's second Cooper (Moss was in his first, of course) stormed into the lead. Allison passed him on lap 15 while Moss, who had made a poor start, falling to 6th early on, began to go like only Moss can. Soon after half distance he was through to the lead and, taking Trintignant with him, the two proceeded to leave Allison behind, reversing the first heat situation. Stirling's best lap, and he dd at least 20 of them under the pole time, was a sensational 54'49 seconds and his margin of victory over Allison in 3rd place was sufficient to claim the overall win. Having been half a minute behind Allison in Heat 1 Trintignant was only able to claim 3rd place but was very happy to beat Salvadori by a comfortable margin to take that place. Stuart Lewis-Evans in the B.R.P Cooper was a good 5th in Heat 2 but having had a very poor Heat 1 was unable to overtake Henry Taylor for 5th overall, while Harry Schell, having a very rare outing in Alan Brown's Cooper was a somewhat subdued 7th. Here is the full result of the 2 heat - 84 lap race:
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If you don't believe that one person can run an entire Formula 1
season, racing every car at every race, you are WRONG.
If you still don't believe, then read on......
What makes my own version of the hobby unusual, maybe even unique, is that I make whole sets of Formula One cars from various eras of racing, then run entire championship series on replicas of the real circuits.
I have heard of people who re-run races and obtain the same result as the real Grand Prix. This
is NOT what I do. Every race stands as a separate event, and before the first practice lap, I have absolutely no idea what the outcome may be. I
have often been told that I must 'cheat' in favour of one driver or another, but, hand-on-heart, I can say that I have never knowingly biased a race
in order to produce any particular result. What would be the point? It would take all the excitement out of the racing.
I will begin with a little background. Since getting myself onto the World-Wide web, I have been amazed at the number of people who are interested and involved in the Slot Racing scene. So I thought it was time I added my own chapter to the story.
My name is Barry James Boor, I am a Londoner, now living in Anglesey, North West Wales. I have been racing slot cars for almost 50 years; in fact, since the day my Dad bought me one of the very first Scalextric sets ever produced. (How I wish I had kept it - it would have been on 'Flog It' years ago.)
There is a short period of my life during which I was lucky enough to actually be involved in REAL Formula One racing, but apart from that it has been slots, all the way.
Up to 1998, I used to run each Formula One season with a new set of cars each year. However, this was around the time when F.1 cars began to look all the same and started sprouting extra bits all over the bodywork. Colour schemes became extremely complex and overall I became totally disillusioned by the whole business - so I stopped building them and started on cars from the earlier years of Formula 1.
Since 1998 I have run three full seasons of races for cars from 1959-60, 1954-57 and 1961-62. I called these series Historic, Pre-historic and Halfton. You will find links to those season's race results in the links list below. Currently - November 2008 - I am in the middle of a series using cars from 1958 only - the Avgas series - but unusually for me, I am running both F.1 AND F.2 cars.
When I was making modern cars, I used Scalextric motors, wheels and tyres, but virtually everything else was totally home-made. Chassis, bodies and wings, as well as my own unique steering system are manufactured in my own large garden shed - The Millennium Shed!
Nowadays I am casting my body shells in resin and am using a mixture of Scalextric and Airfix components, but as from the start, the chassis and steering systems are completely home produced. The tyres I am now using are silicone and are made in Ohio by the brilliant 'Mad Jack' Stinson.
I SHOULD STRESS HERE THAT I AM TOTALLY NON-COMMERCIAL. I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER, SELL ANY OF THE CARS I MAKE. THEY ARE MINE - ALL MINE !!!
Back in about 1994, I wrote to all the current F.1 teams telling them what I did, just in case anyone thought I was cashing in on their designs. One or two teams never answered, (McLaren, Ferrari), but most were very sympathetic, and sent me drawings or photos to help me to produce even better cars. Lola, who were running that Ferrari-engined car at that time, invited me down to the factory in Huntingdon. At the end of that season, I sent them one of the cars. Last thing I heard it was in Mike Blanchet's office. (A bit of name-dropping - Derek Warwick also has one of my cars, his last F.1 Arrows.)
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If you are still with me, and if you are in any way interested in what you have read so far, over the following pages, I intend to cover the range activities which go to make up my lifetime hobby. This will include:
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I completed the last race in the Historic series on the 25th February 2003, 3 years and 8 months after I started; and after a close and interesting battle the World Champion of this series turned out to be Innes Ireland in a Lotus Climax 18. You will find a picture of his car along with all the others from this series, if you click here.
If you would like to see the results of the races I have run in my HISTORIC series, click here.
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Trying to think of a name for this series was difficult so although chronologically it came AFTER the Historic series the cars were from earlier years, so the PRE-Historic series was born.
This series gradually expanded to reach a total of 45 cars - a picture of which you will find on the Prehistoric page. This series of races eventually finished around the end of 2005.
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This series came about due to the fact that I was able to collect Airfix slot car bodies off Ebay. Airfix's most prolific time, slot-race-wise was the early part of the 1960s, when they produced four very respectable cars; the Ferrari Sharknose, the Porsche 804, the Lotus 24 and the Cooper T.53. I decided that to bring in a certain amount of variation, I would stretch the series from 1961 into 1962. This gave my the opportunity to build some other cars. The Airfix cars formed the basis of my series, though I had to build several other cars myself - B.R.M, Brabham, Lola, Gilby, Emeryson, de Tomaso. I even 'cheated' and included a Honda towards the end of the Halfton series, though I am fully aware it never actually appeared until 1964.
The final race for these cars was run on 10th December 2007.
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I REALLY HAVE GIVEN UP WORK NOW!!!
Here are some pictures of current cars - you will find descriptions at the bottom of the pictures.
About time I changed these images. We now have (top left to bottom right) the beautiful Dave Jones bodied B.R.M Type 25 from 1958; the first of my new series for 1950-51 F.1 cars, the enigmatic B.R.M V.16; then we have four rare 1958 F.2 cars: the OSCA, the Porsche RSK; the Behra-Porsche and the amazing Fry Climax.
As mentioned, the Type 25 shell is by Dave Jones; all the others are home-made using the slush resin technique that I now favour.
For the small number of total masochists out there, click here to see the race results from my PRE-HISTORIC SERIES.
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Anyone interested in all things historic connected with motor sport would do well to look at the Atlas F1 Nostalgia Forum. You will find an amazing group of people there, contributing incredible facts and information on anything and everything to do with motor racing from recent times back into the dim and distant history of this wonderful sport. You can sample Atlas by clicking on this link:
Just to prove that I have made some fairly modern racing cars too, here are a couple of thumbnails of late 1990s F.1 cars:
Clicking on either image will take you to a page that shows all the different cars from 1998.
If you have any comments or want to know anything else, please e-mail me on brucebook48@tiscali.co.uk
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