About The Race Place
A century of slot car history, lived out at our track every week.
Our Mission
Keep slot car racing alive in Central Florida. Make it welcoming to newcomers, competitive for veterans, and accessible to families. Sell good gear, host honest races, and keep the doors open.
The History of Slot Car Racing
Slot cars are older than most people guess. Tin-plate electric cars guided by a slot showed up in catalogs as early as 1912. Lionel ran a slot-and-rail electric racing system in the 1910s. The shape of the modern hobby — small electric cars, hand controllers, scale tracks — really took form in the late 1950s, when British company Scalextric introduced its first 1:32 sets and slot cars exploded into a global craze.
The 1960s were the boom. Commercial slot car centers opened in shopping centers across the United States — at one point there were more than three thousand of them. Eight-lane wooden tracks fifty to eighty feet long became the standard. Hot rod magazines covered slot car racing alongside drag racing. Then, just as quickly, the boom collapsed under its own weight by the early 1970s — too many tracks, not enough racers, the novelty fading.
What came back was the hobby underneath the fad. Clubs and family-owned shops kept the lights on through the seventies and eighties. The 1990s and 2000s brought a steady revival as digital systems, better motors, and online communities reignited interest. Today, slot car racing is in a healthier place than it has been in decades — smaller, smarter, and built around shops like ours that focus on community over volume.
Our Story
Greg Walker owns and operates The Race Place, and he brings a background very few in the slot car business can claim: Greg has raced at full scale. In the 1980s, IMSA saw him behind the wheel at 200 mph — not scale speed, real speed.
That rare perspective — knowing what it takes to race both at scale and for real — is what he brings to the shop every day. Greg would love to see you at The Race Place and introduce you to his passion for slot car racing.
Our Values
- Welcome the new racer. Nobody arrives knowing what they're doing. We remember.
- Run fair races. Tech the cars, post the results, hand out the trophies. Same standard for everyone on the grid.
- Support the local hobby. Buy from independent suppliers when we can. Sponsor youth racing nights. Send racers to bigger meets when they're ready.
- Don't gatekeep. Slot car racing nearly died once because it got too insular. Not on our watch.