Photos Steven Pham Photography LLC
Christmas morning, 2004. David Beattie opened the box his wife had hidden down the hall and found what he'd asked for. A slot car track. From the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, the one with the loop-de-loops and the 1/43 scale cars that were more toy than model. He didn't care. He ran downstairs and set it up on the floor like he was nine years old again.
He didn't tell her it was the wrong scale.
The following week he went out and bought a 1/32 scale Carrera set. Larger cars, wider track, more like the real thing. Within a few months he had a 12-foot layout in the basement. By the end of the year it was 18 by 18 feet, 130 linear feet of track, with sections modeled after Suzuka and the corkscrew at Laguna Seca. His brothers came over and they raced. He'd come home from work and just run cars through the turns, watching them drift, adjusting speeds, losing time in the best possible way. It was, as he puts it, the best escape he'd ever found.
It helps to understand what slot car racing used to be. Because it used to be enormous. In the early 1960s, Aurora Plastics bought the rights to a British slot car system and introduced it to the American market just in time for Christmas 1960. Within five years they'd sold 25 million cars. By the mid-60s there were more than 3,000 commercial raceways in the United States, pulling in $500 million a year. Raceways operated like bowling alleys. You'd walk in, pay an hourly fee, rent a car if you didn't have one, and race whoever showed up. In 1963, the U.S. slot car championship aired live on The Tonight Show. Then the serious guys showed up with custom wedge-shaped cars and foam tires, running laps three times the speed of anything a father and son could manage, and the casuals stopped coming. By 1975 fewer than 200 tracks remained. Video games didn't kill slot cars. The slot car community did. The games just filled the vacuum.
But it didn't disappear from houses. If you were a kid in the late 80s, you had Tyco. You had the black light track and the loop-de-loops and the little trigger controllers that broke if you squeezed too hard. You had Saturday afternoons where every kid on the block brought a box of track pieces to someone's house and the only goal was to see how many rooms you could get it to run through. You plugged Transformers into outlets all over the house because the cars would slow down on the long straights if you didn't add more power. You never once built the layout on the box. It was always something else. You painted the cars with whatever was in the garage, cleaned the track surface with nickels rubbed back and forth to scrape off the corrosion, and you tried like hell to be fast. We were all trying to be fast. None of it was sanctioned. All of it was sacred.
That impulse is what had David building Suzuka in his basement by Christmas, and what sent him to Dearborn after a friend told him about a retired Ford Motor chassis designer named Jimmy Attard who had a wooden slot car track in his house. David went to see it, and something clicked.
Jimmy's track wasn't plastic. The slots were routed into sheets of MDF, and instead of steel rails the power ran through copper tape laid into the surface. The cars didn't use magnets for downforce, which meant you couldn't just mash the trigger and expect the car to stick. You had to drive it. Brake into the turns. Manage the throttle. If you came in too hot the car would spin off. If you got it right you could watch a 1/32 scale Porsche 917 power-slide through a corner in a way that made your chest tighten. The electrical system, borrowed from model railroading, allowed multiple cars to run in the same lane. Six cars across four lanes, switching between inside and outside lines, the pack spreading out like a real field. It wasn't a toy anymore. It was a simulation.
David went home and told his wife he was going to build one. Over the next year, with Jimmy and a few friends, he measured his basement, doodled layouts, and started cutting. The track filled an 18 by 20 foot space, 170 feet of racing surface across three lanes. His daughter Maddie, three or four at the time, could walk around the whole thing and slide down the Dunlop hill he'd built into the elevation change. He tuned the cars himself. Changed tires, swapped motors, adjusted gear ratios for more torque on the tighter sections. You could go as deep as you wanted. Some guys built their own chassis from scratch. David didn't go that far, but he went far enough.
Then, in 2008, Detroit's economy fell off a cliff and David lost his job.
He'd been an operations manager at a large-format print shop. Nothing to do with building things, just managing designers and output. Good job, steady income, gone overnight along with a lot of other good jobs in a city that was bleeding out. He had a wife in school, a young daughter, and a 170-foot slot car track in his basement.
He thought there might be a market for do-it-yourself wooden tracks. Nobody was making them. He routed some slots into plywood sheets, soldered copper tape from a Tiffany lamp supply shop for the power rails, painted the surfaces, and made a few modular kits. Then he printed up some business cards, drove to the local hobby shop, and asked Tom if he could set up in one of the aisles.
Aisle six.
He built a four by sixteen foot display track. Maddie went with him to Joann Fabrics and they bought a checkered flag to drape over the base. He was there on weeknights and weekends. People would walk by and stop. "I remember these as a kid." An older gentleman lingered at the far end one day, said some guys in his Porsche club might be interested. Nothing came of the sale, but a friendship formed, and soon the Porsche Club of Southeast Michigan was racing on David's big track in his basement.
People he knew from his old life would see him there, standing in aisle six of a hobby shop, and ask if he was okay. He'd gone from an executive office to demoing toy cars next to the paint aisle. He sold exactly one track from that first run. One. He delivered it to an older gentleman's basement and the man was so happy that David decided the feeling was worth the math.
Then he got an email. "Hi. I'm interested in a slot car track. My name is Jim Farley. Could you build me Laguna Seca?"
David Googled him. Jim Farley had just come over from Toyota to Ford. David quoted him $4,000, which he pulled out of thin air, and got the job. He got home and realized he actually had to do it now.
While building Farley's track, he contacted Autoweek about a full-page ad. Casey Crane, the editor, asked if he was the guy building Farley's track. They bartered. One track for two full-page ads. David moved his operation out of the side of his garage and into a friend's electrical shop, a 25-foot by 15-foot spot between the vans.
Somewhere in that stretch, Pebble Beach called. They were celebrating the centennial and Phil Hill, and wanted a miniature recreation of the Pebble Beach road course. David said sure, then Googled what the track looked like. He didn't have any money. He borrowed enough to stay in a motel 20 minutes outside Monterey. "We heated the room with a hairdryer," he says. It was one of those places where the gas pumps were 15 feet from the door. There was nothing glamorous about it, except that it was Pebble Beach week.
He set up in the automobile tent and people loved it. Jay Leno walked through, as he does every year, and David got his attention through the producer. They shot a segment of Jay Leno's Garage right there on the spot. David name-dropped the Farley build on camera and the phone started ringing.
Robb Report named him one of their best of the year. Ford Motor Company commissioned a track for the North American International Auto Show. The Discovery Channel came out. Samsung hired him to build a track for a trade show. The Today Show wanted the Neiman Marcus holiday track on set. David stood next to it while they filmed. They didn't put him on camera, but his wife and Maddie came along and got to see the green room and all the behind-the-scenes. "It was really a great experience," he says. The phone kept ringing.
Then Zak Brown reached out. United Autosports, IndyCar, McLaren Racing. He wanted a track for his place in Carmel, Indiana. David said he could fly down in his brother-in-law's homebuilt plane in two weeks. A snowstorm killed that plan. Zak sent a private jet the next day. David and his one employee got on a 16-seat plane with a notepad and a measuring tape. The basement wasn't finished yet, just insulation hanging from the ceiling and bare concrete. Zak said don't worry, it'll be ready when the track is. They designed a 25-foot layout incorporating Indianapolis, Riverside, Long Beach, Monaco, Le Mans, and Eau Rouge climbing to the highest elevation.
A few weeks later, Zak threw a Super Bowl party and invited David to host the track. Bobby Rahal walked in, full of energy, and started inspecting details. "Hey, I'm Bobby Rahal." "I'm David Beattie." Bobby looked at it all for a long moment. "This is awesome. I gotta go eat something before I buy one of these." David told him to eat light.
Bobby disappeared. David could hear someone on the racing simulator in the next room, banging into walls. Then it went quiet, and a minute later the thing was singing. Downshifts, clean entries, the sim being driven the way it was designed to be driven. David looked around the corner and it was Bobby, alone, threading laps. They raced on the slot car track afterward. Bobby was competitive as hell. Then he shook David's hand and left.
Halfway back to Detroit, David's phone rang. "Hey, Dave, this is Bobby. I want a track. Can you be in Chicago tomorrow?" David said Tuesday. Bobby wanted Road America. Twenty minutes after that call, another one came in. Jerry Forsythe, the IndyCar team owner. He wanted Road America too. "I was building this house," Forsythe told him, "and I pulled your ad out of Autoweek, and I've been holding it for three years. Now I'm ready for the track."
Two Road Americas, 20 minutes apart.
That's the thing about what David does. It's not about slot cars. It never was. The cars are the mechanism, but the product is a feeling. His clients are mostly men in their 50s, 60s, 70s, guys who remember Christmas morning and the smell of the transformer getting hot and the sound of a tiny motor winding up on a plastic straight. They carried that memory around for decades, and now they have the means and the space to bring it back, except this time it's made of wood and copper and hand-painted landscapes, and it fills up a room in their house that nothing else could.
David knows this. He built his entire business on it. "Find what the key is to the market you're aiming for," he says. "Is it nostalgia? Because that is a really good one." His daughter Maddie figured it out too. She started her own business in high school called Possibly Handicrafts, making shrinky dink earrings from Nickelodeon characters. The kid who bought checkered flags at Joann Fabrics grew up and found her own version of the same principle. You tap into what people remember. You give them a way to feel it again.
David didn't have a business plan. He didn't have a finance background. He wishes he had, and he'll tell you that. But he also knows that if he'd understood the real cost of payroll taxes and sales tax and materials and rent before he started, he might not have started at all.
"Being that I didn't know what wasn't possible, I just kept going."
This article was featured in Issue 005 of the Petrolicious Post
