VIP Developments and Disasters
1962
With sales of the R1 set going well, Victory added three new items to the Raceway range.
These were announced at the Brighton Toy Fair in January 1962 and became available as the year went on.
Ferrari
R62 Ferrari
The R62 Ferrari quickly proved itself a popular addition to the range, although sadly, poor temperature control during production left stresses in the plastic which means that these have often adopted a banana like shape over the years. The tall thin roll bar on this model is also very vulnerable and most models which have seen any track time will have had this part broken off. Almost all the colour variations of this model come with a white nose cone, but the dark blue and red versions also came with a nose in the same colour as the body as shown above.
Lap Counter
R51 Lap Counter
The R51 Lap Counter is almost all made from injection moulded plastic and pushed the factories moulding techniques to the limit. Because of this its operation is less than perfect although it does work most of the time! As can be seen from the rather attractive box, it included additional dials to allow the user to set the event and car numbers for each race.
Chicane
R30 Chicane
The final addition this year was the R30 chicane, a rather severe piece of track made up of three separate sections. This was to be the only addition to this style of track.
1963
The First "Club Specials"
R61S Lotus
Throughout 1962, works-entered VIP slot cars had appeared at major club meetings throughout the country driven by local hot shots and the results from these formed the basis for Victory's 'Club Specials'. Externally there was little to distinguish these from the standard models, but once on the race track the performance improvement from the hotter motor and grippy rubber tyres were easy to see. Despite being 20/- dearer (almost twice the price) of the standard cars, they proved very popular and sales were close to equal with the equivalent standard model.
It's not clear if there were visible differences to begin with other than the silver pole pieces of the motor, some but not all of the early cars I've come across feature red wheels instead of yellow and the majority (but again not all) appear to have been fitted with chrome wheel trims and a "Club Special" transfer on the bodyshell. The factory felt obliged to add in their promotional material that the cars were so fast...
We do not recommend them for normal use and certainly not on our standard Figure 8 track without extensions.
Hot stuff indeed!
Guide Blade
R98 guide blade
Around the same time, a new type of guide blade was introduced, the first from any manufacturer to offer pick-up brushes which could be replaced without the need to take the car to pieces. Again Victory were a long way ahead of the field with this simple, practical design and it quickly became the standard for most home-built club racers.
Receivers Called In
As the new "Club Specials" made their way to the shops, Victory Industries (Surrey) Ltd were due to appear at the Brighton toyfair with the first in a new range of slot car kits, and this advertisement appeared in the January issue of British Toys magazine.
VIP Advertisement
However, in the early part of 1963, all the problems from Victory's past finally caught up with them. Although sales of slot cars were booming, on their own they simply didn't provide enough revenue to keep the cash flowing, pay off all of Victory's shareholders and still make a profit. Without any commissions for new promotional models on the books, the banks and the shareholders decided things weren't going to get any better and on the 28th of January the receivers were called in.
The K series kits were cancelled and for a short time it looked like things had finally reached the end of the road, however Ivor Spence who had been appointed by the receivers to manage the company during its liquidation put together a rescue plan that might save the profitable slot car part of the business. The price was high, but after a lot of effort he managed to find a backer to finance the deal and on the 27th of March the new company was formed under the name of Presstead Ltd. This was changed to Victory Industries (Raceways) Ltd in August that same year.
BRM
One of the first acts by the new company was the introduction of the fourth car in the Raceway series, the R63 "Stove pipe" BRM. It was very popular and is easy to find today but just like the real car, the exhausts proved to be extremely vulnerable and are often broken on second-hand models.
R63 BRM
MGA & Austin Healey
Around the same time as the BRM's introduction, Victory also bought back their two old faithful's, the MGA and the Austin Healey. The tooling for both cars had been modified slightly to accept the inline motor and sadly this meant that the detailed interior had had to go. It was replaced by a flat semi-triangular adaptor plate with the same upper torso type driver figure used on the F1 cars mounted on top. The passenger side "seat" was initially filled by a sponge tonneau cover although this was left off on later versions and on the set car models.
Austin Healey & MGA
Somewhat compensating for the lack of interior were the new chromed plastic wheel trims which were a great improvement over the original wheels. The final alteration was the replacement of the original two pin acetate windscreen with a sturdier three pin version moulded in clear plastic. As the original seems fairly impervious to damage, I can only assume Victory had received complaints that the original was proving to difficult to find if you dropped it on the floor. The cars were renumbered after the modifications - R64 for the Austin Healey and R65 for the MGA.
1964
The Varispeed Controller
Varispeed Controller
One area where Victory had fallen behind slightly was in regard to their hand controller. Scalextric amongst others had by now bought out variable resistance controllers which unlike their earlier switches gave full control across the speed range. Although Victory's two speed device was still perfectly adequate for use with their sets, they were wholly inadequate for club use and thus the Varispeed controller was developed.
As well as offering the desired fully variable speed control, the design also incorporated an additional terminal to allow the controller to be wired for dynamic or power assisted braking. Slightly less useful although made much of in their publicity was a novel locking device which allowed the speed to be fixed in any one of 26 positions for continuous running. This was useful for running in a new car or bedding in new motor brushes but surprisingly carried no warning about its potential to burn out the controller!
Fred Francis Joins Victory
Fred Francis, the inventor of Scalextric and by now a very wealthy man, had been busy with other projects when news had reached him about the collapse of Victory Industries. For some time he had been thinking about a return to slot car manufacture and this seemed to him to be an ideal opportunity. By the time contact was made, the new company was already well underway and so Fred joined as a development engineer although he made clear his intention was to buy out the original investor for whom this was simply one of many business interests.
By way of introduction, Fred handed over all the rights to a new track design he had been working on which all parties felt would be a major improvement on the current product. Tooling up began by the middle of the year ready for launch in January.
Fire at the Barfax Works
Before that however, Victory faced yet another major setback. Just after 4:00am on Thursday 19th November, neighbours close to the factory were woken by the sounds of explosions and burning.
Fire
Five fire engines raced to the scene and it took four hours to bring the blaze under control by which time much of the plant and stores area had been destroyed. Although with Christmas looming, the fire couldn't have come at a worse time, it wasn't quite as disastrous as it first appeared. Although much was lost, the office buildings, production facilities and toolroom were largely spared, and in consequence limited production was able to resume within 10 days of the blaze. Distributors and the trade in general proved very sympathetic during this difficult period and it was with a due note of triumph that Victory took up their stand at the Brighton Toy Fair in January the following year with new track and new sets to the fore.
Although with hindsight some observers may have had suspicions about the causes of the blaze, the conclusions of the fire brigades investigation were that it was entirely accidental.