[woodcote]

I enjoyed the extra episode too. Of course, mostly trains - and has to be seen primarily as an attempt to tell the history of Hornby through ten products. Never an easy task in any medium… I tried to write the history of Scalextric with four models a couple of years ago: https://blog.jadlamracingmodels.com/2021...four-cars/

The very brief Scalextric section of the programme used ‘a Porsche’ to give a brief glimpse of the heritage of slot cars, how they used to be made, a nod to the 1980s heyday etc. The actual car was simply something to hang that narrative around. Jools Holland’s Minic stuff (including a couple of Porsches) was really interesting, because OO scale is a second late-50s slot car origins story that’s rarely acknowledged in the UK. A British competitor of Minic - Derek Brand’s Model Motoring - became the best-selling slot car system of all time in the hands of Aurora in North America.

I bought that silver Porsche with my pocket money in 1979 or ‘80 and a few of us ran them (with lights) in an enjoyable rug-racing endurance series at weekends and in the school holidays. So nostalgia-wise, it was an excellent choice as far as I was concerned. And although a couple of minutes was no time to tell the story of slot cars, it was a decent effort by a TV production team looking at our hobby from the outside. I enjoyed it.