The smell hit you before anything else did: warm copper, fresh oil, and the faint metallic tang of ozone from the motors or the acrid hint of burnt varnish from a transformer. That smell meant a basement was ready for racing. Sections of track snapped together over cold concrete, ninety-degree turns and narrow lanes and neon-colored guardrails assembled and rearranged until the layout finally felt perfect. Upstairs, dinner was probably getting cold.
Two cars, two lanes, and an argument every single time over who got the inside lane, because everyone knew the inside lane was faster if you could hold it. Track connectors worked loose eventually, and you learned to fix that yourself with electrical tape and patience. Bodies got swapped between chassis so often that half the cars on the table no longer matched the pictures on their boxes. A new car meant something real back then.
You turned the box over in your hands before opening it, reading the paint scheme and the number on the door, deciding whether it looked fast. The first lap after pulling a car out of the box was always too fast, a lead-finger moment just to see what it could do before the actual racing began. By the mid-1970s, Aurora’s AFX line had magnetic downforce built into the chassis. The cars stuck to the track through corners that had previously launched them off the table and under the sofa.
Buyers noticed. Retail orders climbed every quarter, and display booths at toy fairs grew larger to keep up with demand. Sales followed: 15 million dollars in 1970, 45 million by the end of 1976. Three times the revenue in six years, with no sign of slowing down.
That figure should have been a launchpad for something bigger. Instead, it turned out to be the highest point the entire company would ever reach. No one in that basement was thinking about balance sheets. You were thinking about whether you had saved enough allowance for the next car in the catalog, and whether the kid down the street would trade you a spare guardrail for it.
But Aurora was no longer just a slot car company by then, and you could not see that from the basement floor. The food giant Nabisco had owned Aurora since 1971 and pushed it toward board games, dolls, and cheap licensed merchandise tied to whatever cartoon was hot that season. Walk down the toy aisle in 1975 and you would find the Aurora name on things that had nothing to do with racing at all. Slot car boxes were still there, but crowded, sharing shelf space with a company trying to be everything at once.
Those toys needed something slot cars never had: constant national television advertising just to move product off crowded retail shelves. They sold through big discount chains that squeezed suppliers to the last penny of profit before agreeing to stock anything. Even genuine hits barely covered their costs by the time the bills came due. One of those lines made things worse.
A horror-themed set called Monster Scenes pulled Aurora into real trouble with worried parents and hostile press coverage in 1971. Complaints came in from living rooms across the country, and retailers pulled the items from shelves within weeks. None of that reached your basement. Your AFX car still ran the same Saturday afternoon whether the parent company upstairs was making money or not.
By 1977, Nabisco had a toy division that looked active on paper but was actually losing money. Something had to change, so Nabisco made a single phone call, and that call was the decision this whole story turns on. In 1977, Nabisco sold Aurora’s model kit tooling to a competitor called Monogram, ending Aurora’s run in model kits forever. Then it sold everything else.
The toy business and the slot car division inside it went for 11. 5 million dollars total. Eleven and a half million for a brand that had generated 45 million in sales in the prior year alone. Nabisco wanted out, and it priced the deal accordingly.
The buyer was a British toy company most Americans had never heard of and still have not: Dunbee-Combex-Marx. The boxes on the shelves did not change, same logo, same packaging, same cars. Nothing about the sale appeared anywhere a kid would actually look. But the company that bought your favorite childhood hobby was already carrying problems Nabisco never bothered to ask about.
Dunbee-Combex-Marx had built its entire business by buying other struggling toy companies one after another, anything cheap. In 1976, it bought Louis Marx and Company, once the largest toy maker on the planet, now badly faltering. Aurora came next in 1977, another logo added to an already crowded pile that included a doll company and a train set manufacturer. Now it also owned a slot car brand run from a factory on Long Island.
Its chairman, Lord Westwood, told shareholders Aurora would be quickly rescued and made profitable again. Given what happened later, that sounds like a man who never understood what he had just bought. The factory in West Hempstead kept operating exactly as it always had. The kids buying those cars had no idea any of this was happening.
They just kept racing. Elsewhere, the company supporting them was already coming apart. Slot car companies are not usually killed by an interest rate, but this one was. By 1979, British interest rates had risen to 17 percent.
Borrowing money to keep a toy empire running cost a fortune every month, and the strong pound made it hard to sell anything abroad on top of that. The British side of the business was still profitable, while the American side, especially the Marx and Aurora plants, was losing millions. By November 1979, the company owed more in America than all its assets there were worth. No bank was willing to lend it another dollar.
That did not make the local news in most towns. Basements kept running through the winter of 1979 as they always had, transformers humming, cars racing, with no awareness that the company that made them was sinking across the ocean. The bank holding the loan cared a great deal. The company tried to sell its failing American brands before things got worse, but every one of those deals fell through.
Nobody wanted to take on the debt attached to them. On February 19, 1980, Midland Bank ran out of patience. Dunbee-Combex-Marx was placed into receivership. Shares that had traded at 178 pence froze at just 22.
Most of the company’s value vanished in less than three years. Across its American operations, 2,500 workers were laid off almost at once and without warning. The Aurora factory in West Hempstead, New York closed the same week. The machines stopped while finished cars sat untouched on the production line.
Stores that had sold AFX products for years simply stopped receiving boxes. No announcement, no final shipment, just an empty space on the shelf where those cars used to be. Kids asked their parents whether the cars had been discontinued. The parents did not have a real answer either.
The company that made the toy no longer existed. Fixing a worn gear or a broken guide pin used to take five minutes and a quick trip to the hobby shop for a replacement part. After February 1980, it became a scavenger hunt, people combing classified ads and hobby magazines for parts for cars nobody made anymore. Those workers did not lose their jobs because the cars stopped selling.
They lost them because a British toy conglomerate overreached and sank, and Aurora went down with it. For a few chaotic years after the collapse, almost nobody knew who actually owned the AFX name. A shadowy entity called Aurora Canada held it for a while, then went bankrupt itself. In 1983, the Japanese company Tomy stepped in.
It bought the name, the patents, and every piece of the original tooling outright. Tomy also brought back the engineer who had designed the original high-speed chassis years earlier, a man named Jim Russell, who had left Aurora before Nabisco sold it. Russell had spent years watching from the outside while other people’s decisions destroyed what he had helped build. When Tomy asked for his services, he did not need much persuading.
With Russell back at the drawing board, the cars started winning again, faster and smoother, designed the way hobbyists had always wanted them. Slowly, the smell came back too, warm copper and fresh oil, some basement somewhere firing up again after years of silence. By the late 1990s, Tomy received two major commercial offers to acquire the American side of the business. It refused both.
Tomy understood those buyers would dismantle the brand the same way Aurora had been destroyed before. Instead, it handed the entire operation to Jim Russell personally. In 1998, Russell, his son Steve, and his wife Mimi founded a small family company called Racemasters. Jim’s health began to decline in 2003, and Steve and his wife Lori gradually took over management.
After Jim passed away in 2010, they kept building on what he had started. That work eventually produced the Mega G+ chassis, one of the fastest HO-scale platforms ever built. Walk into a hobby shop today, and you can still buy a car that is a direct descendant of the one that flew off your basement track in 1976. Some of the men racing these cars today are the same kids who raced them the first time.
Older now, still arguing over who gets the outside lane. Some of them are teaching their grandchildren how to hold the controller steady through a curve, the way someone once taught them. Step back, and the real story looks different from how it looked from the basement floor. Aurora’s cars never failed.
The company wrapped around them was sold twice by people chasing spreadsheets instead of understanding what they actually owned, once to get rid of it, then almost by accident to the one person who truly understood it. The car survived because someone who genuinely loved the hobby finally got the chance to run it on his own terms. The people who dealt with Aurora at the corporate level mostly never set foot in a basement with a track. If you had one back then, part of you already knew the cars were never the problem.
It just took the rest of the world a little longer to figure that out.
