Model Motoring
In the late 1950s, Aurora acquired the rights to the "Model Motoring" slot car racing system from U.K. toy manufacturer Playcraft. Aurora's first HO-gauge racing sets appeared in the fall of 1960. Following improvements in the chassis with the Thunderjet and A/FX series and the adoption of popular racing car body styles, Aurora's "Model Motoring" race sets became top sellers, with over 25,000,000 cars sold by 1965 (HO Slot Car Racing 1999-2011).
By the end of the 1970s, however, the slot car craze had passed and modeling in general was on the decline (HO Slot Car Racing 1999-2011). One website attributes the decline to both the maturing of the baby-boom generation along with the fragile economics of the slot car industry and the closing of many slot car shops as toy companies offered smaller sets to be used at home (Slotblog 2007).
Read more about this topic: Aurora Plastics Corporation
Famous quotes containing the words model and/or motoring:
“The striking point about our model family is not simply the compete-compete, consume-consume style of life it urges us to follow.... The striking point, in the face of all the propaganda, is how few Americans actually live this way.”
—Louise Kapp Howe (b. 1934)
“What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)