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e’ve all been there. That gut-wrenching moment when you know you’ve overcooked it. Just that bit too quick into Turn 1. The rotation kicks in at the rear and you’re helpless.

Everything goes slow motion and before you know it… total chaos. You’re cartwheeling through the air, eventually coming to rest on your roof. Underneath the sofa.

They may be small and labelled as ‘just toys’ by many, but Scalextric cars are pieces of automotive art, which is why they’re collected by millions of all ages. Head to any toy shop this Christmas and you’ll be assaulted with rows of vibrantly coloured car options.

Fancy a 1/32 scale Jim Clark complete with his Lotus 49? Pick him up. Or a bit of touring car door bashing? There’s ones for that. How about being a Mcrae for a day? Sure, why not?

Scalextric can make it happen and at one point or another we’ve all felt an affinity to those little plastic cars, which makes that almost inevitable sofa shunt all the more emotionally damaging. The realism and resemblance to the cars we love is a key part of that.

But just how does the British company get the cars to look, and feel, so lifelike on track? It’s a longer process than you might think.

“We’re always working about 18 months ahead of ourselves,” says Scalextric’s product development manager Darren Nye. “The biggest challenge we have is that we cater for a variety of different customer types, all at one time. We have the collectors, who demand serious precision and only go for the limited edition and rare products and don’t usually even take them out of the box. Then we have the hobbyists who love the realism we bring to the models, but still want to race them. And then we have the ‘toy’ market, which usually just wants to crash them!”

That’s a wide range of intentions to cater for. But, whatever the consumer, realism is a key factor. At Scalextric’s HQ in Sandwich, Kent, a small team of designers regularly pump out accurate recreations of some of motorsport’s most famous and iconic cars. From Formula 1, to touring cars and GT via camper vans – the range is staggering.

“Typically we release between 60-100 new products per year, so that’s around two new cars per week, each year,” says Nye. “We offer the widest variety of cars of all the slot car brands. And we’re always looking at new models to add to widen the range.

“Our researchers are always monitoring the new models, teams, drivers and the results they achieve. You have to be bang on trend with your choices too. For example if we know of a new GT3 car coming out, we have to time our commitment to modelling it perfectly. If we commit too early, the car may be hugely unsuccessful in real life and nobody will want it. If we’re too late then everybody else will beat us to the punch and it won’t sell as well. We need to hit the curve at the right time.”

Obviously, Scalextric’s wide range means this isn’t always an issue. Classic cars like the Jaguar E-type or historic F1 machinery don’t change overnight, neither will the fictional or kids’ designs. But it’s likely the more colourful modern cars – such as the touring cars, prototypes and GTS – will catch your eye at some point, and those are the ones that exist in a fasterchanging environment.

Scalextric’s production process takes multiple steps, both in the actual design and production, but also in working with the manufacturers themselves to ensure the correct licensing agreements are adhered to.

The first step is the actual design, which surprisingly has to be done almost from scratch, regardless of what data is available for the real-life version of the chosen car.

“Once we’ve decided on a new model – let’s say the Mercedes AMG GT3 for example – we’ll look at the feasibility of what we want to do with it,” adds Nye. “For example we’ve made multiple variants of THEBMWZ4 GT3 for the last five years, so we’ve got good use out of the tooling sets and moulds we created to make that model.

“Once we’ve agreed the rights deals with the manufacturer, they’d send us their CAD [Computer Aided Design] files for that car. They give a good outline but for us they’re no more than a guideline. Those plans are for a fullsize car and incorporate every nut and bolt. We have to strip them down to the bare lines almost and then recreate every surface from scratch in-house to model the car to scale.”

Oscar Thornton, one of the firm’s digital design team, adds: “When the CAD files arrive the first job is to scale it down by 32 times and then simplify it. Then we redraw a skin over the car’s skeleton and stitch each surface together like a digital quilt. We apply a second skin to set the body thickness so we don’t get the plastic sinking.

“We also model the car in exploded form as there can be up to 30 different parts on each car, and the majority are bespoke to that car. We don’t use a spec chassis part as each car has its own dimensions and design, so we have to recreate that. It takes six to eight weeks per model to produce a final design.”

Once that final design is complete, the plans get sent off to the factory in China where the moulds and tooling will be created, and the model can begin production. All of Scalextric’s slot car products are made using injection moulded plastic.

With the form of the car set, attention switches to arguably the most exciting bit. The liveries.

Scalextric goes further than any other brand in this department, offering multiple livery designs for many of its models.

“We study the liveries very closely,” says Nye. “We like to pick the ones that are the most eye-catching and popular with the fans, but those cars also have to be successful and we have to ask ourselves what story each car has behind it. What’s that car’s appeal?”

The latest trend for liveries comes from the immensely popular Anime cartoon designs used largely in Japanese Super GT, but which are slowly leaking across to Europe too.

Often hugely intricate, these represent a big challenge to the graphic design team.

Tombills recently worked on the reconstruction of the Hatsune Miku Goodsmile Racingbmwz4. He says: “With most designs we have to redraw

them digitally by hand, which is a big job. Sometimes we can get access to the original livery artwork from the designers, but often those don’t tend to scale down well. By redrawing them we can use a vector software that means the images aren’t formed by pixels so we can scale them up or down without losing image quality.

“The Anime designs can take a lot of work. We have to redraw the characters on the car from multiple angles to make sure we get the perspective right, and often the characters are accompanied by complex shapes in the background too, and it all has to be modelled accurately. The Goodsmile design took just over two months to get right.”

Once the design is set, it will be printed and applied to each model using water label decoration, which is a process of applying an intricate bodysticker by hand, like a vinyl wrap. This method has been used for the last five years, replacing the traditional Tampo Printing technique – likened to applying paint layer by layer, like potato printing – to enable Scalextric to incorporate more and more detail into its designs.

A layer of protective lacquer is then applied to most models, just to ensure your sofa doesn’t do too much damage.

Scalextric also takes into account the chances of those over-exuberant Turns 1, 2, 5, 19 – accidents, and works to make sure its models are as robust as possible.

“Because we work closely with the manufacturers our hands are tied in some respects as many want their cars modelled as accurately as possible, so if a design is fragile in real life then it will be in the model too, but we do take a lot of steps to make our cars tough,” says Nye.

“We ensure things like rear wings are ‘pop-on, pop-off’ and not glued so they can be refitted easily. We take care in the design stage too to thicken the plastic in any areas we think may be vulnerable. Then we do things like model some parts, such as wing mirrors, from PVC so they have a bit of flex to them and can cushion the main chassis. We make them as durable as we can.

“By following the manufacturer’s designs so closely we also do find that different cars have different characteristics. Some are faster on straights and some are better through corners. They pick up real speed and are likely to be generating real downforce, as that’s what they were designed to do in real life. Relatively speaking, when scaled up these models would be travelling somewhere over 500mph, so they’re real performance-based things.”

Of the current product range, the bulkier GT and touring cars appear the most naturally durable, but models like the classic and contemporary Formula 1 designs can be much less so. F1 cars are on the very edge of performance capabilities in real life, which can be a dilemma for model makers.

“We have to do a lot of work on an F1 model,” adds Nye. “The cars are notoriously lightweight, thin and fiddly, and would break easily as slot cars. So we actually had to model our own generic F1 cockpit. To do that we studied every car on the F1 grid and developed our own happy medium, which was much stronger.

“To that we then add removable front and rear wings and any seasonal changes, such as the shark fin engine covers from this year. F1 is the fastestchanging part of our business as the rules change quite often and that dictates the cars’ shape, and the liveries and sponsors change a lot too so we have to constantly update.”

Adding a new model to the shelves, Nye says takes between 12-18 months depending on the licensing, design and actual production of the moulds and tooling needed. Something as intricate as Mr Clark’s classic Lotus can take all that and more due to its extra parts. To simply produce a current car in a new livery takes around nine months.

Some big work goes into making those little cars that liven up so many homes each Christmas. So next time you have a little-big off under the sofa, just be thankful that they build them strong. ■