A groovy kind of love

Some people believe slot car racing is a playroom pastime. The plastic track practitioners of Molesey Scalextric Club assure FELIX PAGE it's much more serious than that

- PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN BRADSHAW

A Nissan Skyline Turbo Super Silhouette racer barrels into the first corner at a hair under full throttle, its comically outsized rear end just beginning to spin out wide as its super-sticky slick tyres concede to the laws of physics and lose grip on the glass-smooth track surface.

For a fraction of a second, it looks as if its steely-eyed pilot can pull everything back in line and send the Group 5 icon scrabbling towards turn two at full pelt, in pursuit of another blistering lap record. But then, disaster: the Porsche 911 RSR endurance racer on the inside misjudges its pace on corner exit and careens haphazardly across the track, slamming into the opposite barrier and eventually coming to rest on its roof - whereupon it is brutally impacted by the Nissan at a closing speed well north of 200mph.

Scale speed, anyway. Had an incident of that magnitude occurred in real life, the consequences could have been catastrophic, but as it is, the crash is glossed over with a snigger from the spectators and a sharply worded suggestion that the Nissan driver visit the local branch of a well-known chain of opticians.

Welcome to Molesey Scalextric Club - home to perhaps the most intense and fiercely contested motor racing you'll find inside the M25 and touted as one of the most competitive and highly skilled groups of slot car racers in the country. You could walk right past its venue and never know it was there, though, as I do several times - before club chairman Neil Green pops out of the door of an anonymous-looking block of flats and beckons me from the cold to the sanctuary within.

It may be subtle, but it's the perfect home for this thriving community, as he explains: "We've been around for 50 years. We've had various buildings: when I joined 20 years ago, we owned a hut probably not as wide as this, just 50 yards away on a school field."