At 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning in 1974, 10-year-old Scott Neveu was standing in front of his bedroom closet in Westland, Michigan. Boxes of slot car parts, plastic model car parts, and chipped Hot Wheels were stacked neatly at his feet. His mother had not yet woken up the house for her weekend trip to Hudson’s house, and the suburban house was silent. What will he play with first? That day was a blank canvas.
“I was an only child,” Neveu says, looking back 50 years. “Everyone else was playing sports with sticks and balls, and I wanted nothing to do with that.” Instead, he spent the whole morning (and night) alone with his car. I did.
By the time he finally graduated to full-size vehicles, this young enthusiast had built, crashed, and repaired enough slot cars and models to have his own miniature salvage yard. Boxes of knick-knacks piled up in closets and under beds were raw materials that could be quickly recycled. Ready for a new life.
Inspiration struck one evening when Neveu’s parents took him to Flat Rock Speedway, a local racetrack downstream from the Motor City. In the 1970s, the 400-meter oval was a hotbed of grassroots racing. Many cars competed that night, but the most memorable one was the figure-eight racers colliding. In this class, crude vehicles with dented fenders and mismatched wheels sped through intersections. Neveu sought to bring this action back to his own country.
Cameron Neveu
He came up with the idea of building a tower and tying a car to the end like a tetherball. The car is powered by an electric motor and driven in circles using a controller. Multiple cars tied together would cause the wreck fest he witnessed in Flat Rock.
“Until then, I had only seen tethered car racing in hobby magazines,” Neveu says of this popular gas-powered hobby. “I thought, ‘Maybe we can do it on a smaller scale if we use electricity.'”
Elementary school students were already learning about transformers. Early on, he almost killed himself by plugging the wires of a slot car motor into a wall socket, and ended up welding the motor to a solid ingot. For this contraption, he sourced a transformer from an old slot car set.
Cameron Neveu
In addition to tearing down and rebuilding slot cars, he had modified and disassembled quite a few AFX and Strombecker trucks. He wired his new project to look like a slot car track. Instead of a groove, metal contacts rotated freely around a small brass pole. Power travels from the transformer through wires to the pole, where it is output on two wires.
Cameron Neveu
He then found a way to connect his car to the tether wire. “We ended up using stereo speakers,” says Neveu. “I remembered feeling the friction in the socket when I plugged it in, so I went to Radio Shack and bought a bag of 10 for $1!” He also bought a small motor at an electronics store. , I found telephone wires lying around my house.
Cameron Neveu
He wired up two used slot car controllers so they could start and stop the connected cars with triggers, and set about building the cars for the set. Two of his first cars were a GTO (built from an MPC model kit that easily sells for $100 on eBay today) and a 1969 Corvette.
The first tower worked, but young Neveu did not rest on its laurels. Almost immediately, he built a second tower and placed it across from the other tower, creating an impact zone where the two circumferences met. “Everything was about the crash,” he says. “You can only go around super fast for that long.” He then added ramps and used the tower on a variety of surfaces, including asphalt, wood, and even dirt he snuck into his parents’ basement in buckets.
Cameron Neveu Cameron Neveu Cameron Neveu
Additional vehicles were also assembled. Many were outfitted with slot car gear and axles sourced from local hobby shops. “We didn’t want to make it too good though, because remember, it was all about the crash,” Neveu said. “If the car broke down, I would fix it, so there was always a hot glue gun and a soldering iron at the trackside,” he added. Young children sitting cross-legged on the floor were racing, building, repairing, and learning.
Cameron Neveu
“I learned a lot from this project when I was a kid,” says Neveu. “In addition to electricity, I learned about torque and speed gearing and the balance of the car. Moving the door sockets back and forth changed the way the car handled.”
Eventually, Neveu also had a child, and the tether car set became a nightly pastime he and his son shared. myself! At some point, our family started calling those cars “round cars.” The name stuck.
Children of Neveu, early 2000s. Cameron Neveu
Last weekend I visited my family in northern Michigan and my dad tore down a tower and a pile of old cars. We installed it on a concrete pad in front of his garage. I grabbed the camera and he grabbed the controller. He attached a periwinkle 1957 Chevrolet to the cord and pulled the trigger. It rolled forward until it gained enough speed to become a blue blur. We played for hours, laughed, bumped into each other and had as much fun as we did 50 years ago.
Cameron Neveu
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