[woodcote]

       

A year later and a lot had changed at Scalextric. New management had stripped out much of the experience in the Scalextric team - Adrian Norman included - and the staff who set the 2015 Scalextric World Championship in motion were no longer at Margate by the time the autumn came around. Not surprisingly, the Championship was a shadow of its former self, with just a handful of UK events and one in Holland, although no-one is sure that ever took place. A single brand-new member of staff was left with the World Championship as a very low priority on an extremely long list of tasks that probably would have been shared by a team of 5 or 6 people the year before...

However, Sarah was keen to support us and topped up our SWC kit with some new cars and a bunch of prizes for the day. With the experience of 2014 under our belts, we sort of knew what we were doing. The media work was slicker and we managed even more pre-event coverage than before, making the regional daily newspaper's top five shows of the week...

   

It was Mike who did the interviews on local radio this time and he obviously did a great job as three stations gave the event plenty of coverage in the week before and regular mentions on the day...

   

Another early start focused on setting up the big SSDC track...

       

Two of us set up the much smaller World Championship track within an hour...

       

We learned a few things from our first attempt and the format was streamlined to fit more races into each hour. We'd also spread the load of race control on the SWC track. This year we were ready in plenty of time for doors opening at 11am and even had time for a couple of crew-only races to warm the track up...

       

One slight fly-in-the-ointment was that another Scalextric World Championship event was running in Harlow on the same day. The organiser hadn't been easy to track down. With all our press work, we wanted to tell our local media who had won the World Championship within minutes of the events ending. After an uncomfortable conversation on the Friday evening, I wasn't at all hopeful this was going to work. However, by Saturday morning, my focus was on our event and making sure everyone had a fabulous day...