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Victory Industries

Victory Industrial Products was a very small company that began it's life during the second world war in a small boat house which stood directly alongside Kingston Bridge in Hampton Wick near London. It was founded by two men, Captain William John Warren and Gerald Fenner Burgoyne who set up the company to manufacture small electrical components for the Ministry of Supply.

The new 1:32 VIP Raceways system first appeared at the London toy fair in February 1961. With stunning set-top artwork by the then relatively unknown artist Michael Turner, the new R1 sets were given a very warm reception by the trade press. The sets were available between 1961 and 1965. These sets generally included one R60 Cooper and one R61 Lotus but were also sold with two Coopers or two Lotus throughout the production period.

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Roadedge and Pathfinda

The original concept behind the Roadedge and Pathfinda projects had been to develop a means for fans of road and racing cars to emulate their counterparts in model railways, allowing them to build tracks and layouts around which individual cars could be driven. This idea stemmed from various articles which had been appearing in the British Model Maker magazine around that time. The Roadedge & Pathfinda system was a simple way to produce a working roadway utilising the existing Victory model range. It went some way towards meeting that concept, but suffered from the fact that even the most basic of layouts took up a great deal of room. Fine for a car showroom where space was less of an issue, but rather impractical for most households. The reaction of the press and the public to the display at the 1956 British Industries Fair convinced everyone that whatever the shortcomings of the Roadedge & Pathfinda system, a truly viable commercial project was not far away so even before the fair closed it doors, Victory's designers were set to work on the next step.

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Electric Rail Racing

The pages of Model Maker revealed how electric rail car enthusiasts at the pioneering Southport Model & engineering club had settled on 1:32 scale as a standard for their track. The Southport club adopted this scale for a variety of reasons chief among them being that 1:32 scale offered a good compromise between cars that were big enough to avoid over-sophisticated engineering (i.e. existing motors would fit without extensive modifications) and tracks that were small enough to be manageable. Victory were quite happy to follow this and many other leads from the pages of the magazine in the configuration of their own design.

Electric rail cars did suffer from a basic failing. Because the cars had to ride a fixed rail above the surface of the track, the cars had to be designed to run with a relatively high ground clearance placing many restrictions on motors and gearing. Victory's un-blinkered experience with the electrified track at the B.I.F. meant that a clear solution to these problems was self-evident. Simply split a conductive road surface into two separately insulated halves and guide the car by an insulated peg between the two. Not only was this simpler to mass-produce, it also avoided the problem of the raised rail which proved to be an unnecessary throw back to gas-powered rail cars

Victory's experience with small electric motors and with injection moulding plastic meant once the basic parameters were established, the design of the models became fairly straightforward. It did however take some time to produce the tooling for the injection-moulded cars and in the mean time Victory lost valuable publicity to Scalextric by only revealing their prototype system to a select few. When both systems reached the shops, Victory's product was vastly superior but by then Scalextric was the name that everyone heard about.

Here's a 1957 Rod & Custom article called "Road Racing at Home" that talks about Rail Racing and the "new" hobby of slot car racing. It also mentions the first U.S. commercial slot car track opening in Kalamazoo.

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Cars

Victory's slot cars were a great hit and their Set 'A' remained in continuous production from 1957 until 1961. During this period many thousands were sold worldwide and consequently its not a very difficult set to find today in venues such as eBay.

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Victory Slot Car Diagrams

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Model Changes

• 1957 Steel spur gear, large section carbon motor brushes pressed into brass mount, paxolin brush carrier, orange colour motor windings, large diameter commutator with notable gap between it and motor windings, large cross section motor bearings, large flat holes on base of motor side plates, small unsleeved suppressor, metal weight at front of chassis, solid crossmember on front axle, spring steel wire pick-ups, thin moulded line beneath V logo on chassis, driver and steering wheel are both a push fit into cockpit.
• Spring 1958 Clear/white nylon spur gear, red colour motor windings, small diameter commutator flush with motor windings, small cross section motor bearings, small dished holes on base of motor side plates, driver and steering wheel heat welded into place. Other details as 1957.
• Autumn 1958 Small section carbon motor brushes pressed into brass carrier, large sleeved suppressor, no metal weight, two holes in front axle crossmember, multi-strand phosphor-bronze pick-ups. Other details as Spring 1958
• Spring 1959 Motor brushes now soldered into brass mount, black nylon brush carrier. Other details as Winter 1958
• Winter 1959 Black nylon spur gear. Other details as Spring 1959
• 1960 Moulded line beneath V logo on chassis flattened down (don't ask me why!). Other details as Winter 1959

The cars then remained unchanged in this form. The sets were discontinued in 1961 and this version of the individually boxed cars in 1962.

The set cars, MGA's and Austin Healey's, were produced in Yellow, Yellow, Red, Red Green, Green, White, White, Dark Blue, Dark Blue and Grey Blue Grey Blue colours. Reportedly, White cars only appear to have been produced up until early 1959 when this colour was discontinued and replaced by the Dark Blue variety. White cars only seem to appear in the sets.