Onwards and Upwards
1983-90
Stability
The club made consistent progress throughout the rest of the decade, the finances stabilised with a modest surplus each year, membership steadily increased and reached the 500 mark by December 1990.
During this period the club organised several factory visits and race meetings while the swapmeet calendar expanded to three a year, with events in Birmingham and Farnham together with the first appearance of the Milton Keynes event in July 1987 which has been running ever since.
Milton Keynes Swapmeet 1987
Newsletter
This gradually expanded, became a bit more professional and was regularly running to 20 pages by the end of 1990. The original photocopied A4 version was superseded in early 1984 by a commercially printed A5 issue and has remained at that size to date. The familiar laurel wreath logo also made its first appearance on the front cover at this time.
Members adverts still formed a significant part of the content but the number of informative articles about the hobby greatly increased as time went on.
The original secretary/editor, Rob Brittain handed over to Mike Pack in May 1983 who ran things and produced the newsletter until June 1985. Incidentally, the handover was slightly delayed which resulted in the April issue being missed. This was the only month the magazine failed to appear until 2019!
In July 1985, the two jobs were split and Norman Wheatley took over as editor until December 1990 with Mike Pack continuing in the secretary/treasurer role.
Bearing in mind that this was long before proper home computers became widely available it is a credit to the various editors that so many issues were compiled with nothing more than an electric typewriter, cut out pictures and a large jar of flour paste!
Club Cars
Nowadays the world and his mother seems to churn out ‘limited edition’ slot cars – mostly limited to the number that they think the mugs will buy at a suitably inflated price! Back in the 80s these hardly existed when the club initiated the production of unique models available only to its members at sensible prices.
Prior to the formation of the club Scalextric had never really bothered with such things but, during a factory visit in 1982 it was discovered that the moulds for the original Bugatti from the 60s still existed. After some persuasion Hornby agreed to produce a limited run of Bugatti bodies and chassis only in yellow, green and red for NSCC committee member, Steve de Havilland. They were marketed by Steve’s business, ‘Traffic’ and initially only sold to club members in 1983 with surplus ones being offered to the public later.
Following on from this the first pair of complete club cars was produced in 1984, a reissued 60s Alfa Romeo 2.3 Litre in a unique dark red colour and a Ford Escort XR3i in sky blue with separately applied NSCC decals.
Club Cars
They were followed by a grey Datsun 260Z in 1986/7
Club Cars
Unfortunately, a change of Scalextric management occurred around this time and they lost interest in producing any more club cars for many years so two further ones were commissioned from MRRC instead, an orange Porsche 936 in 1988 and a brown Mini in 1989:
Notable members
Julian (Jules) Birley joined in 1985, just a collector at the time and long before his Pioneer slot car business was set up.
Gary Cannell joined in 1986, more about him in the next part of the history.
Bruce Patterson from Australia joined in 1989, the proprietor of Pattos Place which produces a myriad of slot car decals and parts.
By now the club was firmly established and had expanded worldwide with members in every continent.
