Our 2027 season equals this year's record of 33 events at the Barn, with exactly the same events on the calendar. There are some tweaks to the dates. The three WHO Digital GT Championship Wednesdays revert to the third Wednesday of the month, two weeks after the monthly HO race. The WHO Goodwood Revival returns to its usual slot in September, with the Digital Test Night moving back to a jam-packed August. Both July and August see four events at the Barn - another action-packed summer holiday programme, which has proved very popular over the past two years.

Race fees remain at £3 adults / £2 under-16s on Wednesday nights and £6 adults / £4 under-16s for the Digital Saturdays. The Slot Rally GB Championship event in July is hosted by the club - fees and regs will be publicised in due course by the Slot Rally GB organisers.

More details about our WHO Slot Rally, Scalextric Digital and HO scale formats and regulations for next season will follow very soon. 

Here's the 2027 WHO Racing Calendar as text...

1. Wednesday 6 January – WHO Mod & WHO Tuners – Round 1
   
2. Wednesday 13 January – Scalextric Digital – Nascar & Trans-Am
   
3. Wednesday 27 January – WHO Slot Rally – Winter Stages
   
4. Wednesday 3 February – WHO Nascar – Round 1
   
5. Wednesday 10 February – Scalextric Digital – Nascar & Trans-Am
   
6. Saturday 27 February - Scalextric Digital – WHO American Speed Fest
   
7. Wednesday 3 March – WHO Formula One – Round 1
   
8. Wednesday 17 March – Scalextric Digital – GT Championship Race 1
   
9. Wednesday 7 April – WHO Mod & WHO Tuners – Round 2
   
10. Wednesday 21 April – Scalextric Digital – GT Championship Race 2
    
11. Wednesday 28 April – WHO Slot Rally – Spring Stages
    
12. Wednesday 5 May – WHO Nascar – Round 2
    
13. Wednesday 19 May – Scalextric Digital – GT Championship Race 3
    
14. Wednesday 2 June – WHO Formula One – Round 2
    
15. Saturday 19 June – Scalextric Digital – GT Championship Race 4
    
16. Wednesday 7 July – WHO Mod & WHO Tuners – Round 3
    
17. Wednesday 14 July – Scalextric Digital – Nascar & Trans-Am
    
18. Saturday 24 July – Slot Rally GB Worthing Stages
    
19. Wednesday 28 July – WHO Slot Rally – Summer Stages
    
20. Wednesday 4 August – WHO Nascar – Round 3
    
21. Wednesday 11 August – Scalextric Digital – Nascar & Trans-Am
    
22. Wednesday 18 August – Scalextric Digital Test Night
    
23. Wednesday 25 August – WHO Slot Rally – Dakar Rally Raid
    
24. Wednesday 1 September – WHO Formula One – Round 3
    
25. Saturday 18 September – Scalextric Digital – WHO Goodwood Revival
    
26. Wednesday 6 October – WHO Mod & WHO Tuners – Round 4
    
27. Saturday 16 October – Scalextric Digital – WHO Birkett Six-Hour Relay
    
28. Wednesday 27 October – WHO Slot Rally – Autumn Stages
    
29. Wednesday 3 November – WHO Nascar – Round 4 + AGM
    
30. Saturday 13 November – Scalextric Digital – Tin Top Saturday
    
31. Wednesday 17 November – HO Test & Fun Night
    
32. Wednesday 1 December – WHO Formula One – Round 4
    
33. Saturday 11 December – Scalextric Digital – Tin Top Saturday
    

Any questions, just ask.

There may also be occasional Friday evening sessions at the Barn over the next year or two. We'd like these to be a chance to try out new stuff that club members want to share. Carrera Digital, 4-lane analogue and Carrera Hybrid are all possibilities - as is some 1/28 scale RC racing, the public debut of SlotNav (see here) and some slot car hill-climbing. Expect a flat £5 entry for these extra evenings.

I'm trying to find local groups or clubs in the North Orange County, California area. Anyone out there know of a way to find a list of either groups, clubs, or even tracks in my area. I've tried searching but I'm just not very good at it I guess. The only one I'm finding is Electric Dreams, which is a good distance from me. I'd appreciate any help on this.

Wanted: Scalextric or Carrera Formula E and/or (Scalextric) Jaguar i-Pace cars.
The don’t have to be pristine… missing wings, spoilers etc are no problem. All they have to do is drive. I live in Germany but I do have private contacts in the UK that might be able to be a middleman if that makes things easier.
Price?: As cheap as possible! :-D

We have been aware of some issues with the SlotRacer site for a while now, first with an unfeasible number of visitors to the site over the last few months, then with some of our regular members reporting problems logging in, and on top of that a recent outage. 

Unfortunately I couldn't find any problems, but the recent outage meant I could put in a request to our web hosts technical department, who got back to me today.

Quote:We have now examined the server logs in detail and identified what is happening.

What is actually happening is that your site is being crawled very heavily by automated software, and it is being caught in a loop that generates an effectively unlimited number of pages.

These are not real pages on your site, but because of the way the site is built, the server accepts them and runs the page code anyway. Each one appears to the crawler as a new page containing further links, so it follows them, and the process repeats without end. The result is a limitless supply of addresses for automated software to work through.

The scale of this is considerable. During the period you reported the site as unavailable on 24 August, our logs recorded over one million requests in a single hour. That is what caused the timeouts. The server was not down, it was simply unable to keep up.

This is still happening. Today the site is receiving around fifty thousand requests per hour, and just over 182,000 requests so far today are for these invalid addresses.

The traffic comes from a very large number of different internet addresses, with no single source standing out, so it cannot be resolved by blocking individual addresses.

Basically the site is being overloaded by automated software. For a site like ours, a low key site, to have a million hits in an hour is ridiculous. The purpose of it is unclear, but the effects seem obvious enough.

I will be making some changes over the next few days, as the tech team have suggested, but they are site wide permission changes so if they don't work as expected it could have some unexpected consequences. But, we don't have a choice, our regular members are being put off by log in problems, so....

Here we go.

I have come across the following vintage slot car kits: 
White Point Klassic Slot Cars 1/24 scale Porsche 908 Lola T70 Piper GT Volvo 144? Alpine A110 
LSRF 1/24 RTR Chassis 
Dream Slot Car GT 1/32 
Looking for a valuation of these kits.

   

Our September AFX Formula One Championship race was the final instalment of a non-stop summer at the Barn. Seven Wednesdays and a Saturday since the start of July have certainly kept us all entertained.

   

We've seen some cross-over tracks at our HO races this season and this month a classic WHO Mod layout dropped into F1. Never an easy build, this one is guaranteed to provide drama for the fastest class, but how would the F1 cars manage with the challenging layout and the bus stop chicane?

Over to Gareth for the race report...

Her at the museum is a 1/32nd scale Eldon demolition set MIB. There are 2 versions of this set. This is the one that is a little bit harder to come by. It has the blue and white cars instead of the more common red and yellow cars. If you are not familiar whit this set the cars can crash into each other and the bumpers and roof fly off. We have both versions here at the museum.Marx was going to make a similar set but only got as far as making a prototype which we also have here at the slot car museum.
       

New to the slot car museum is an HO scale Pontiac Bonneville convertible made by Marusan of Japan. They also made the bodies for Atlas. This car differs from the Atlas version by the chassis and the boot is not black. We also have another one which is a pale yellow color. These are some what hard to find. We have a large Marusan collection here at the museum so come and visit !                    

This was a car of my childhood, obviously not as prestigious as the MGB or MG Midget, but it was perhaps a car that I wished my dad would have bought. A kind of small standard "British Leyland" family car with a tuned up motor in which would have impressed my school mates at the time.  Sadly most of these would have rusted away into oblivion before I got my driving license. But it left it's mark in my mind.

So as the opportunity has arrived to make a small Saloon car, I have bought a Airfix kit of the model and a Amato chassis to fit it.
Now the Rally car portrayed on the box is a rather boring looking post box red colour below.
   

But I remember the car I adored in my youth was this kind of 2 tone version with green upper and off white (Old English White) lower body colours. It was quite rare in those day to have 2 tone colours on the body, as the most popular colour of the basic family saloon in the late 50's was still black, and it was only at the beginning of the 60's that basic family car colours became more varied.  And 2 tone was generally limited to more luxurios level models.

So perhaps I can reproduce this old childhood dream and own one (well OK a slot car version) 
   

Hello chaps!
Alright, a few updates since my last post.
The track now has a computer plumbed in, which is nicely Bluetoothed up to the valve amp and pair of Denon speakers behind it:



Additionally, I added *another* carousel:



Also, the LEGO train got a loop at one end, and is about to get another at the opposite end - as soon as the track is delivered:





And finally, the cut-with-a-breadknife single lane sections are in place, and working a treat:




Here's an overhead shot of how it currently is..........for now.....bwhahahahaha!