Electric Dreams Goes To the (1:1 Scale) Races
by Arie Viewer
By now most of our readers know that Scott Bader, the owner of Electric Dreams, is a serious vintage racing enthusiast in both 1:32 / 1:24 scale and 1:1 scale. We got a chance to see him in action the weekend of June 23-25 at the HSR West event at California Speedway.
If you‘ve never been to a superspeedway nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of one. The sprawling complex is simply massive. And not just the track itself; the facilities, from the parking lots to the grandstands to the hospitality suites to the garages, are all constructed on a grand scale. On this particular weekend there was almost nobody there but the participants so it was easy to wander around and get a feel for the sheer size of the place. We could walk through the entire paddock and climb to the roof of the hospitality suites behind the pits where we had a panoramic view of the track without 150,000 other people getting in the way. All in all it was a much more civilized environment than a NASCAR weekend, despite the 100+ degree heat that had us guzzling bottled water almost constantly. The right crowd and no crowding, to borrow a phrase from another time and place.
Scott brought out three of his cars, all immaculately prepared by his crew headed by the legendary Clayton Cunningham. When we arrived at the track all three cars were sitting under a vast awning running the length of Scott’s transporter, a tractor-trailer rig that once served a top-level pro racing team.
The first was a black March 77B Formula Atlantic still bearing the name of original owner Ted Field and the logos of his Interscope Racing team that campaigned cars in IMSA and Indy Car racing for, among others, Danny Ongais, a drag racer turned road racing star in the 70s and 80s.
The second was the trickest 1965 Corvette roadster you will ever see on a race track. Scott has had this car a long time and it’s developed to a level that most vintage racing cars never reach. Everything on it, Scott says, is period-authentic from the car’s era, but it was 8 seconds a lap faster than anything else in its race group. Part of that, Of course, was Scott’s driving, but a careful examination of the car will lead you to conclude that it’s a very special Corvette indeed.
The third car was a red Lola T294 2-liter sports-racing car that looks like it’s approaching escape velocity even while it’s sitting on jack stands. Alas, that’s where it stayed for most of the weekend after engine problems ended its racing on the first day.
My job for the weekend was to add to everybody’s fun by setting up and running a 4-lane Scalextric layout under one end of the awning. From Friday morning on, the track, which was equipped with separate power to each lane, Parma controllers and a DS timing and scoring system, drew people in for fun (and shade). On hand to help out was that famous fugitive from Froggistan, Philippe de Lespinay. Philippe was in his usual fine form, full of politically incorrect stories and opinions expressed with gusto, on an astounding variety of subjects. He also brought some of his TSR cars that turned truly impressive laps on the Scalextric layout.
I started to take a tour through the paddock with him. It lasted until we came to the one and only Cro-Sal McKee Special, now owned and driven by retired businessman Norm Cowdrey. I started taking photos of the car, and by the time I was done Philippe was deep in conversation with Cowdrey on the subject of the inherent safety or lack of such of currently available racing driving apparel, of which both his knowledge and his conversational stamina appeared boundless.
On the track, Scott had a grand time with his 1600 cc March racing with several other drivers who had upgraded their newer ground-effects cars with 2-liter engines and still couldn’t drive away from him. They seemed very reluctant to believe Scott’s engine wasn’t also a 2-liter. Switching to the Corvette he simply drove away from a small field of big-bore cars that included several GT350s. I suggested to Scott that he ask to be moved up to the next-faster group. “Sometimes I do,” he told me.
Meanwhile, back at the slot car track we had a steady stream of people racing with the Scalextric Porsche Boxsters and Audi TTs we brought out for them to use. These little cars are great fun to drive and easy for complete beginners to get comfortable with. They are also nearly indestructible, which was a good thing in view of the number of times they got driven “over the cliff” and landed on the asphalt.
Not surprisingly, the most prolific slot car driver of the weekend was Scott himself. He seemed to like to follow his big-car driving sessions with a stretch of sitting in a chair with a bottle of water in one hand and a controller in the other, taking on all comers.
The featured race group (1:1 scale) of the weekend was the Historic Stock Car Racing drivers with their locomotive-sized ex-NASCARs still in their original Winston / Nextel cup colors and set up for road racing. The historic stock cars always run on road courses to keep speeds down and safety levels up. Still, at Cal speedway the road course uses over half the oval, giving the weekend warriors a taste of what it must be like for the big-name drivers 38 weekends a year. The famous drivers represented by their former rides included Rusty Wallace, Jeff Gordon, Kasey Kahne, Derrike Cope, Bobby Allison, Benny Parsons, Jimmy Spencer, and Richard Petty.
The taxicabs are becoming an ever-larger part of the vintage car racing scene because there are lots of them available at low prices. Every top-line NASCAR team builds around 20 new cars and retires 20 old cars each year. These cars don’t have a lot of lower-level series to filter down to, so they reach the vintage racer market fairly rapidly, sometimes only a couple of years after their retirement from Cup competition. For mere tens of thousands a vintage stock car driver can own a car once driven by somebody really famous. Any other kind of race car with that kind of pedigree will be priced at six or seven figures. Thus, NASCAR provides the vintage racing community with a steady stream of genuinely historic cars that are cheap enough and replaceable enough to take out and have fun with in a way you can never really do with a multimillion-dollar icon like a Ferrari GTO, even if you can afford it to begin with.
Now that we have our demo track and related equipment together we’ll be doing more public promotions at places with bigger crowds. You may see us at a race track, car show or other public event near you. When you do, come on over, race a slot car, and say hello to the Electric Dreams Team.