I too got an Aurora slot car set for Christmas one year but the novelty wore off quickly. If you were the guy in the outside you could just let the tail end rub against that fence in a turn and take it at full throttle. Soon it became which slot you had more than the fastest car.
It strikes me as humorous in a way to find tons of magazines at the checkout counters now and none of them have anything to do with model cars. You can find all kinds of women's magazines and all those Hollywood mags about the stars and who is doing what with whom, and I wonder why does anyone care about that. Aren't there any men around today who want to build models of cars, or other things, or want to build scale railroads? What will the magazines be in another 10 yrs?
Early in my high school carreer a local guy rented a store front and built a very large slot track in there for 6 cars at a time. There were kits for cars and all kinds of accessories sold for them and I remember them in magazines. Even that got so money could buy a really good car and a guy who had less to spend did not have much of a chance.
But then we got interested in the 1:1 scale dirt tracks nearby and slot cars took a back seat. I have no regrets either.
MB