Word: slot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this some glittering casino, where fortunes change hands on the turn of a card, sending dinner-jacketed bankrupts out onto the beach to blow their brains out? Far from it. This is the U.S.'s latest mania: slot-car racing...
...Slot-car racing seems to have been invented in England, but it might have been made to order for the U.S. market. Model builders and tinkerers have almost unlimited scope for fiddling the hours away with a tool kit; automobile buffs can at last possess that low-slung Ferrari or that hot-rod Model A (or both); will-to-winners can frazzle their adrenals with high-test competition, and Walter Mittys can pocketa-pocketa to a screaming finish in the Grand Prix without risk of fracturing their spectacles...
...Life. A slot car is a plastic scale model of a real car. It runs on a slotted track. A fin under the nose of the car fits into the slot but does not lock there-nothing but the car's weight keeps it in place. Power is provided by electric current picked up by brushes that run along the metal strips flanking the slot. Race tracks have from four to six slots running parallel, each connected to a rheostat to enable the "driver" to control the car's speed. Herein lies the skill; going into a turn...
Cars are made in several scales; most popular is 1 to 24. Speeds scale accordingly; 15 m.p.h. on the 1/24 scale is the equivalent of about 300 m.p.h. In slot-car drag races, where there are no curves and speed is the only criterion, the little cars can accelerate to as much as 600 m.p.h. scale speed, creating the aerodynamic problem of how to keep them from becoming airborne...
Cornell, Dartmouth, and Northeastern can hardly miss getting three of the last four berths, though not necessarily in that order. Providence is fighting R.P.I. for the final tourney slot...