photo by Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph Tyler Slot Cars racer Delmer Brooks of Henderson holds one of his hand painted slot cars Thursday Jan. 8, 2015. Slot cars are miniature electric cars that run on a slot track with a hand remote control. Brooks is a part of Tyler Slot Cars, a group of East Texans who meet Thursdays at Tyler resident Chris Tanner's custom slot car track.

Miniature cars that look like real race cars careen around a four-lane track in a converted garage at 8220 Baylor Drive in Tyler, often moving so fast they are a blur and can hardly be seen.

In command of the cars are guys from East Texas who have raced slot cars since childhood, but as the years went by, they became preoccupied with career and other activities. Now, most of them are in their 60s and have revived their passion for the sport.

They are members of the Texas Retro Racing Association and are sometimes joined by racers from other areas, such as Houston and Denton. In addition to racing locally, members travel to races in Dallas, Burleson, Fort Worth and Waxahaxie.

“It’s difficult but it’s a lot of fun,” David Berry, one of the Tyler slot car enthusiasts, said.  

“It’s fast. We crash at high rates of speed. We pick the car up and keep racing. There’s no chance you are going to get hurt doing this. You get your feelings hurt; that’s about it.”

Although the slot cars are authentic looking, they are small enough to hold in your hand. Some are 1/32nd or 1/24th the size of a real car.

In scale speed, they move between 300 and 400 miles per hour, but their actual speed is about 17 or 18 miles per hour.

A guide on the car runs in a slot on the track. An electric motor inside the car drives the car, picking up electricity from the track and a transformer underneath the track.

Although a tiny figurine sits in the driver’s seat, the real driver is a racecar enthusiast standing beside the track with a gadget in hand — a speed controller with a trigger that the racer pulls to control how much power is sent to the car that also is equipped with adjustable brakes.

“The car follows the slot in the track unless you are going too fast, and then you crash, It’s all about timing and control,” Berry said. “It’s exactly like racing real cars that people watch on TV.”

There’s no money in it though. Wining is basically for bragging rights and a plaque.

Slot car racers carry around toolboxes with drawers containing their slot cars and various gears and tires designed for different racetracks. They plaster their box with small plaques from races they have won.

“The guys take it just as seriously as the real thing,” Berry said. “You get an adrenaline rush when you are going fast, just like racing. You have to go fast to win; we all like to win.”

Berry said he always has liked racecars, but could not afford a real one. He enjoys the competition of slot car racing and the camaraderie with other racers.

Berry first became interested in slot car racing when he was 11 or 12 in 1965 when he overheard some older guys at a hobby shop in Green Acres Shopping Center talking about a slot car track coming to Tyler. Then he learned of the commercial track, which no longer operates, but at that time was in the former Safeway Shopping Center off Vine Street, two blocks from his house.

“My parents pretty much had to drag me out of there every night,” Berry, manager of Bill Day Tire Center, said. “It kind of faded after a few years. I didn’t know that people still raced until about 10 or 11 years ago.”

Chris Tanner also became interested in slot car racing in the 1960s when he was 7 years old.

As an adult, he was busy with other matters, but in 2000, he saw a slot car on the Internet. Tanner ordered the car and realized he needed a track to run it.

“There’s been a track out here in this garage ever since,” he said.

About a year and a half ago, Tanner and a few other slot car enthusiasts together paid for a four-lane track built in Indianapolis that they specially ordered to fit into Tanner’s garage.

Usually at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays, the group gathers in the garage to race their cars.

“I like the real cars and can’t afford those, so this is the next best thing. It’s just like racing a real car, only smaller,” Tanner, a retired accountant, said.

The track is 105 feet long and has five curves. Most of the track is fairly flat, but it banks about 15 degrees in one place. Racers consider it a more demanding track than some of the larger ones they race on in Dallas, because it’s more technical and has more curves.

Slot cars race too fast on the local track for the human eye to count the laps, so an electronic lap monitor counts the number and time of each lap.

Four cars race at once and, at the end of 3 minutes, the power cuts off and whoever has the most laps wins that heat. Racers run four heats because there are four different lanes and each lane is a little different, requiring different finesse and timing.

The lap record for this tract is 3.8 seconds.

Racers race in different classes, for example retro sports cars, scale auto series and Formula 1 cars.

“It takes a lot of practice to be good at it and where you can go fast without crashing a lot,” Berry said.

Enthusiasts who are not in a race stand at strategic spots around the racetrack and put crashed cars back on the track. They are called marshals.

“It’s a lot of fun, and it’s not a particularly expensive hobby,” said Demon Canner, a retired Army lawyer. He said he became interested in slot cars when he was about 9. He picked it back up again in 2012 after marriage and a career.

Racers sometimes buy racecars in hobby shops or online or build the cars from scratch, painting and attaching details to make the cars look authentic. Types of cars they race include a small Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Corvette and Audi.

New racers are welcome to join the group that races on Baylor Driver, but Berry added that in the computer age, most young people prefer to do something that involves holding a computer and pushing buttons.