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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..... |
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 25.4.08 Here are the latest batch of F.2 Coopers:
 From right to left you can see the Rob Walker car; the British Racing Partnership car; then the private cars of Tony Marsh, Brian Naylor, Tim Parnell and Belgian driver Christian Goethals. Only 5 more to make now..... Then there is this:
 Possibly the strangest racing car I have ever made. This is the little-known Fry Climax, which was raced during 1958 and 1959 by none other than the late Mike Parkes. It will be appearing in several of my upcoming F.2 races. And if you don't believe it.... look it up!
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LATEST RACE - updated 29.4.08 LAVANT CUP F.2 RACE - Goodwood
Stirling gave valiant chase but never got anywhere near the flying 12. Roy Salvadori held onto third place ahead of Hill's Lotus until the Atkins Cooper's engine went off. Dennis Taylor made it three out of four as he brought his own Lotus 12 into a comfortable 4th place. Finally a word must be said about Mike Parkes and the remarkable little Fry Climax. Four seconds off the next slowest car in practice, the little blue car got better and better as the race progressed. There was delight amongst the crowd when he actually PASSED Naylor's Cooper, then sadness when on lap 33 the car spun at the Chicane, where it had been having problems all race, and was unable to restart. Parkes' best race lap was a 1. 34'70 as opposed to only 1. 40'23 in practice. Here is the full result:
the only man with the pace to challenge the Lotuses.
passing several cars on his way to 6th.
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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.
If you want to know how all this has evolved, please be my guest and spend some time looking through my site.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 over 40 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, for reasons you will find below, I no longer make modern 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 work/play room.
Since Christmas Eve 2003 I have been running a series which I call the HALFTON SERIES. In the 'Latest cars' box near the top of this page you will see the latest car or cars I have produced for that series - and on the 'Halfton' link lower down this page you can go to see all the cars. 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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The 6 images below show cars from the series I have named the 'Pre-Historic Series'. It was so named because the cars are from an era some years earlier than my Historic series - hence PRE-historic.
This series has gradually expanded to reach a total of 45 cars - a picture of which you will find on the Prehistoric page. There will be no more cars added to this series because at the time of this update (02.01.05) I have run about 35 races with these cars and have no more than around 5 or 6 more to run. Given that I am running 2 different series concurrently, these races will probably take another year or so to complete!
I REALLY HAVE GIVEN UP WORK NOW!!!
About time I changed these images. We now have (top left to bottom right) Tony Rolt in Rob Walker's Connaught; the Mercedes Benz W.196 Streamliner; 2 Maserati 250.Fs, the red one is the enthusiastic but slow Swiss amateur Ottorino Volonterio, while the green one is the Gilby Engineering-owned car, often driven by Roy Salvadori; finally, 2 French cars - the 8 cylinder Gordini and the rarely seen Bugatti.
All except the Bugatti are John Bacon fibreglass shells - the Bugatti is a home moulded job.
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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