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            We have an active slot car club of about 12 committed members here in the greater Minneapolis /Saint Paul area. We have been meeting and racing on Thursday evenings for almost three years now. We are mostly just guys who are motor heads that know we will never be able to afford all the cars we have lusted after for many years. !/32 Scale model racing has allowed many of us to realize our motoring wet dreams in miniature. So we get together to talk cars talk trash and race our slot cars.

            For the first two years we raced together we raced Scalextric Tran-Ams and Ford GT-4 and Ferrari/P4's as our two main classes. We raced our cars with magnets installed and at 14.8 volts. Indy Grips silicone tires were the only upgrades allowed.

All was not perfect in our little scale model racing world though. Although we were just racing for fun, something to talk about and maybe Bragg a little we found that our racing always came down to two members winning all the races. You could predict it as easily as you could predict the sun rising in the east. These guys were just better drivers than the rest of us. Although the guys were getting better the results remained the same week after week. As you can imagine it is no fun to always lose, to realize that you can never win a race night. What was not so apparent was that it wasn't all that much fun for the two guys doing all the winning either. We were also tired of the carnage mag racing at a high voltage will produce. So our goals became:

1.      Eliminate the carnage so we could race any slot car without the fear of tearing it up.

2.      Make the racing close, have fun, give everyone a chance to win.

So … we went non-mag and 11 volts. We developed more classes, raced all our cars, eliminated the carnage, it was great except .. the same 2 guys always won. (one in particular)

We needed a handicap system. This is how we did it.

We use Slotrak as our timing system which has a refueling feature so we are able to adjust the time it takes to refuel and the number of laps you can run on a full tank. Based on qualifying we adjust the refueling time so it takes longer for the faster racer. (if you turn a lap .3 faster then you qualified at you lose the race)

We are constantly refining our handicap system, but the racing is better then ever. This really opened up the fields and expanded our our classes now we were really beginning to have some fun!