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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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The first Avgas (1958) series race was run on June 10th 2006; on August 12th 2009 I completed the final F.1 race for these cars. Stirling Moss has won the Championship, with some ease, unlike in the real world where he lost it by 1 point. If you care to see the cars from that series, please click here. I have been running a 1958 F.2 series alongside the F.1 races and these events will continue well into 2010, with at least 10 more races to go. As usual, I like to have two different sets of cars running at the same time so I am working very hard to complete enough 1950-51 cars to enable me to start racing these cars in a couple of months - I hope!
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LATEST CAR NEWS Updated 8.11.09 The new 'TITANS' series is nearing completion with the addition of these cars:
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 The cars above are the pre-WW2 E.R.As, of which there were (and indeed still are) many examples racing in the very early 1950s and the early Gordinis that were little more than make weights in that era but had to be included. All of these 8 cars caused me no end of problems because of their narrow body size. For an explanation of the solution to this problem, please click here.
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LATEST RACE - updated 7.11.09 INTERNATIONAL COUPE de VITESSE - F.2 Reims
As always at Reims, the cars see-sawed back and forth as slipstreaming was the order of the day. However, I suppose it was inevitable that when the 30 laps were completed it would be the blue and white Rob Walker Cooper at the head of the field. And so it was...... Indeed, Stirling made the decisive break from the rest of the front runners around lap 22 and such was his ability to get through the first very fast corner on the Reims circuit so much quicker than anyone else, that he was able to ease away from the rest and come home a healthy 12 seconds ahead. The top six or seven places had been disputed hotly throughout the race with both Trintignant and McLaren having led at one point. In the end it was Jack Brabham, who had run a fairly low key race who came storming through to take 2nd, pipping young McLaren by just under a second; while very close behind Bruce came Trintignant who had suffered an engine problem around lap 20, slipping rapidly down to 7th. That he rocketed back to a close 4th proved that the car came back on song, confirmed by a sensational fastest lap on the last lap, a full second quicker than his own pole position time. The big disappointment of the race was the exit, as early as lap 3, of the Peter Collins Ferrari. The throttle appeared to stick as he lifted off for Thillois and the car left the track. Thus went one of the more interesting entries in the race, to be followed three laps later by the Porsche of von Trips - robbing the race of much of its interest. The crowd were kept on its toes by the efforts of Jean Behra in his eponymous Porsche-engined creation and Cabianca who used the aerodynamic advantage of his semi-fully-bodied OSCA to stay in the leading group very well, eventually finishing a solid 6th behind Behra. Here is the full result of the 30 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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