Homegrown: These 50-Year-Old Tether Cars Are Still Racing Hard

It was 6:00 am on a Saturday in 1974. Ten-year-old Scott Neveu stood in front of his bedroom closet in Westland, Michigan. Bins of slot car parts, plastic model car pieces, and chipped Hot Wheels were stacked neatly at his feet. His mom had yet to rouse the house for her weekend trip to Hudson’s, and the suburban home was silent. What would he play with first? The day was a blank canvas.

“I was an only child,” says Neveu, as he thinks back 50 years ago. “Everybody else was doing stick-and-ball sports, and I didn’t want anything to do with that.” Instead, he spent all his mornings (days and nights, too) alone with cars.

Before he eventually graduated to full-size vehicles, the young hobbyist had built, crashed, and repaired enough slot cars and models to have his own miniature salvage yard. His bins of bits and bobbles stacked in his closet and under his bed were raw materials ready to be repurposed. Ready for a new life.

Inspiration struck one evening when Neveu’s parents took him to Flat Rock Speedway, a local race track downriver from the Motor City. Back in the Seventies, the quarter-mile oval was a hotbed for grassroots racing. Among the many cars competing that night, it was the smashing and bashing of the figure-8 racers that left an impression. The class featured rough and tumble cars with dented fenders and mismatched wheels, racing flat out through an intersection. Neveu sought to bring the action home.

He came up with an idea to build a tower and tie cars to the end like a tetherball. The car would be powered by an electric motor and would drive around in circles with the use of a controller. Multiple cars on the tether would create the wreckfest he witnessed at Flat Rock.

“Up to that point, I had only seen tether car racing in hobby magazines,” says Neveu of the popular gas-powered hobby. “I thought ‘I can do this on a smaller scale with electricity.’”

The grade schooler had already learned about transformers. Early on, he made the mistake of inserting the wires of a slot car motor into a wall socket, which nearly ended his life, and ultimately welded the motor into solid ingot. For his contraption, he sourced a transformer from an old slot car set.

In addition to wrecking and rebuilding slot cars, he had altered and disassembled his fair share of AFX and Strombecker track. He wired his new project like a slot car track. Instead of grooves, metal contacts spun freely around a small brass pole. Power traveled from the transformer through wire to the pole, and out from the pole on two wires.

He then ascertained a way to attach his cars to the tether wire. “I ended up using my stereo speakers,” says Neveu. “I remembered that when I plugged them in, I felt the friction of the socket, so I went to Radio Shack and got a bag: ten for one dollar!” He also bought small motors from the electronics store and found telephone wire lying around the house.

He wired-in a pair of used slot car controllers, so that he could start and stop the tethered cars with a trigger, and set to building cars for the set. Two of his first cars were a GTO (built from an MPC model kit that easily fetches $100 on eBay today) and a 1969 Corvette.

The first tower worked but the young Neveu didn’t rest on his laurels. Almost immediately, he built a second tower to position across from the other and create an impact zone where the two circumferences met. “It was all about the crashes,” he says. “You can only go super-fast in a circle for so long.” He then added ramps and used the towers on different surfaces—asphalt, wood, and even dirt which was snuck into his parents’ basement with buckets.

Additional cars were assembled, too. More wore slot car gears and axles, sourced from the local hobby shop. “I didn’t want to make them too good though because, remember, it was all about the crashing,” says Neveu. He adds, “There would always be a hot glue gun and or a soldering iron ready trackside because I’d fix the cars after they smashed.” The young kid sitting cross-legged on the floor was racing, building, repairing, and learning.

“I learned a lot as a kid from this project,” says Neveu. “In addition to electricity, I found out about gearing for torque versus speed and car balance. Moving the socket forward or back on the door made the car handle differently.”

Eventually Neveu had children of his own, and the tether car set became an evening pastime shared between he and his son. Me! Somewhere along the way, our family started calling them “Roundy Round” cars. The name stuck.

Last weekend, I visited my family in northern Michigan and my Dad broke out the tower and a pile of old cars. We set up on the concrete pad in front of his garage. I grabbed my camera, and he grabbed a controller. He attached a periwinkle 1957 Chevy to the cord and pulled the trigger. It rolled forward until it built enough speed to become a blue blur. We played for hours, laughing, crashing, having just as much fun as he did 50 years ago.