WHEN SLOT CARS RULED THE ROOM
To this impressionable youth, the entrance to Aladdin’s cave was the Pit Stop, two floors above the Regent Theatre on Auckland’s Queen Street. It was an oasis of multilane wooden slot car raceways, the walls emblazoned with motor racing art and adverts, with hypnotically attractive model race cars in brightly lit glass cases blasting out in the subdued ambient lighting.
The Pit Stop was a mecca for boys and young men in the mid to late 1960s. A twilight wonderland, it attracted us like moths to a naked bulb, glittering with state-of-the-art day-glo/metalflake sleek racers and hot on-track action.
In 1969, we were young pretenders, only just in the first year of high school. We’d heard word through the grapevine of this groovy place where you could race your own cars on big tracks. At home in the bays on Auckland’s North Shore, our previous slot
