By Zach Doell

Shortly before his death in 1974, American Formula 1 driver Peter Revson starred in a series of commercials for the Aurora AFX slot car sets. The following ad is one of them.
Although I was well too young to know Revson’s name while growing up in the early ’90s, I do remember the Aurora slot car set. Quite vividly.
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Plopped down on the living room floor, every Saturday morning my dad and I would set up what seemed at the time like an ancient figure-eight circuit – my dad’s Stirling Moss edition Aurora slot car set circa 1963 – and go racing. The big man usually opted for what I recall was a ’63 powder blue Corvette Stingray. I stuck with a ‘60s Buick Riviera – how racy.
And as anyone who’s ever used one of those sets can tell you, it wasn’t exactly easy. The Industrial Age dial control, not a fancy-schmancy trigger control, was less than forgiving and it wasn’t unusual for your car to break contact and stop on track, only to rocket into the dining room at around 500 mph a second later.
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And that burnt smell. You could smell those little electric motors working feverishly away, and undoubtedly at one point you had to rip one apart to fix something or just to clean the contact points. A real racing experience it wasn’t. But man was it a blast.
Fathers of the Internet – bring out your old slot car sets from the attic, dust them off, and set them up on Saturday morning. Your videogame-toting kids will thank you later.