The holidays are swiftly approaching, and I remembered this recently while on a walk to the local, neighborhood Target department store on the evening I spotted our featured van. It’s not that there were Thanksgiving or Christmas decorations on display at the store, but this is the time of year when it’s probably not a bad idea to start thinking about what gifts to buy for the recipients deserving of your good will and generosity. Also, Target is one of those stores where it’s a good practice to have a list of exactly what one needs, and to stick to just the items on that list. It is entirely too easy to overspend at Target, even at their generally great prices. I needed two things, left with only those two things, and still managed to spend $30. At least they should last for a while.
Getting back to the holidays, I’m thrilled to be getting to spend Thanksgiving this month with my older brother and his family. I’ve been doing some limited amounts of nonessential travel, having been fully vaccinated and not averse to often wearing various face masks on which I get to feature and promote my own photography. Families of origin can be tricky spaces to navigate in adulthood, which I’ve alluded to in some of my musings here at Curbside. My brother was that much older than me that we never attended any of the same schools simultaneously, but that probably played out into how neither one of us really felt like we were in direct competition with one another. Six years or so is a pretty large gap between siblings, and I spent much of my childhood idolizing him and attempting to ape his tastes in clothing, music, and even cars, citing the second-generation Toyota Celica Supra (A60) as just one example of the latter. For much of my youth, he seemed more like somewhere between a sibling and an adult.
Playland Fun Center. (Flint suburb) Grand Blanc, Michigan. Friday, May 18, 2012.
The motor skill set between, say, a second grader and an eight grader, are pretty vast. Still, this didn’t keep me from trying to keep up with my brother while playing tag, Atari, or on the go-kart track, with me crashing into the tires on one occasion in spectacular fashion. I was actually banned by the teenaged attendant from returning to Playland Fun Center in Grand Blanc, Michigan as a result of that accident, and was afraid to ride the go-karts there again until I was a teenager for fear of that guy. If I was a parent, I wouldn’t have let him talk to my kid the way he talked to the young me. I suppose I could thank my brother for being such an impossible benchmark for me to try to measure up against when I was growing up, since it gave me a hunger to push myself hard, but now in healthy ways as an adult, with good boundaries and expectations I’ve learned to set for myself.
One other activity I really enjoyed with my brother was playing with his treasured Aurora AFX slot car track and set. At some point, he had “graduated” from the school of Matchbox and Hot Wheels and had bequeathed those cars to our younger brother and me. Racing slot cars was his new jam. Much to-do was made on those days when we’d all be making a trip to the Toys-R-Us near the Genesee Valley Mall, where the oldest Dennis brother would have some large chunk of money he had saved to spend on a new slot car. What would it be this time? Two of my favorite cars were the baby blue, early second-generation Chevrolet Camaro and the red and orange IMSA Chevy Monza that came with the AFX set, both of which had “working” headlights! They were so exciting to play with at night on the linoleum floor of the otherwise dark and quiet laundry room on the bottom floor of our split-level house.
My brother was very guarded about his slot car set, and generally speaking, his two younger siblings weren’t allowed anywhere near his cars or track, unsupervised. This extended to any of his new slot car purchases. One day he came home with this little blue and white Ford van identical to the one pictured above, and was all excited because it had “Magnatraction”. I remember looking at this miniature van, holding it my palm, and asking, “What is this heap?” Why did he get a van, when the rest of the Aurora AFX cars under our roof (including my blue Plymouth Satellite) were either sports- or sporty cars? “Dude… it has Magnatraction! You see these magnets at the bottom of the chassis? Those help it grip the track and corner better.” “Didn’t they have anything else with Magnatraction? Like even a Pinto or something?” “Fine. You don’t have to race it. Just don’t ask to use it. Ever.” Of course I’d race with the van later.
I’ll never see this generation of Ford E-Series van and not think of my brother’s Magnatraction Econoline. When I saw this example outside of Target, the first thing that struck me is how it even also had two-tone paint like my brother’s slot car (“slot van”?), even if it was instead brown and beige and looked a little like a giant frosted brownie on wheels. I was unable to confirm the model year of this particular example through a license plate search, but I can tell from the front grille that it’s from one of the first four model years of this generation, which was introduced for 1975 and lasted through ’91. This example is riding on the 138″ wheelbase (a shorter 124″ wheelbase was also available), with the E150 capable of carrying payloads of between 2,000 and 2,200 pounds, according to the 1975 factory brochure. Three different engines were available that year, ranging from the standard 300 cubic inch six, and two optional V8s displacing 351 and 460 cubes.
So, did my brother’s Aurora AFX Magnatraction van handle better than the other slot cars? One thing I remember was that the magnets, while they helped this relatively tall “vehicle” stay flatter than it otherwise would have in the curves, seemed to slow it down a bit in a straight line compared to the other cars. And it was still unwieldly in corners, made only slightly less so by the presence of the extra magnetic grip, or “gription” as we called it. In fact, one of my favorite things was to be on the inside track with the van and suddenly accelerate into a corner and knock a competing vehicle off the track with the sheer mass and heft of the van swinging outward from the back. This would often send the Camaro, Monza, or Satellite in the outer lane off the track, skidding across the floor on its roof until it smacked against the leg of my dad’s wooden study table or the washing machine, with its detachable plastic body then popping off the chassis and spinning around until it came to rest.
My current Carrera Evolution slot car set. Sunday, February 22, 2015.
Slot cars seemed like a natural progression from Matchbox cars as I was becoming more curious about the inner workings of how vehicles operated versus being interested only in how they looked, with an increased awareness of the intricate mechanisms inside of a car, truck or van that made it go. The rubber tires and various accessories available for purchase for slot cars could make you feel like a mechanic, as you sought to soup-up the performance of your favorite car, or even its sound, with my Satellite having an attachment that clicked in an attempt to replicate the sound of glasspack mufflers! We called that one the “Satel-heap Special” because that attachment made it sound like the car badly needed a tune-up.
The driver of this brown Ford van looked a little nonplussed when I started snapping a few photos of her navigating this Econoline in Friday rush hour traffic in my neighborhood, but I hope she either didn’t mind or that she understood that I didn’t mean any disrespect. This is the old, American architecture of van that basically doesn’t exist in this form anymore, and running examples are getting only thinner on the ground. I hope that on the off chance the driver reads this essay that she understands just what a big smile she brought to my face as the sight of her brown, two-tone Ford made me recall yet another step in my journey of becoming interested in all things automotive. I also hope I’ll always have it in me to appreciate the joys of racing slot cars.
Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois.
Friday, October 15, 2021.
All other images and print materials were sourced from the internet.
That van brings back memories for me, too. Our neighbor across the street, a local policeman, drove a single tone brown (the darker one) 1976 Ford van as his personal vehicle until the early 2000’s. It was a short wheelbase model with the small hubcaps, a 6 cylinder, and a 3 speed manual. He kept it in rather nice condition through the years.
I also raced slot cars as a youth. I had a purpose built one that wasn’t modeled after anything, and a black 1969 Camaro. I too remember the performance upgrades available, and had quite a bit of fun with it as a youth. Have not seen a slot car track for many years =(
Apparently, slot cars have evolved now to where you can control your car by phone and actually change lanes! I supposed they’re not really “slot” cars anymore, but the principle is the same.
Slot-less cars, then? Sounds *kinda* fun, but sorta takes away some of the charms that made slot cars, well, slot cars. Also, controlling them from a phone would erase the sensations one gets from holding one of those wired and chonky Parma controllers in your hand, feeling the wire-wound resistor in the top getting warmer and warmer as the race goes on.
Two of the other words that come to mind are “Womp” (I’ve only raced 1:32) and “Tiger Milk”. I tended to slather the foam rear tires on my Womp with said Tiger Milk so that I could break traction on the first couple of corners, as it was quite entertaining to my young self. Sometimes this backfired, and my car would spin out of control and de-slot itself.
I worked at our local jail for 15 years before I was “medically” retired. We had a ’99 Ford van that looked the same as this one other than the grille. It was one of our prisoner transport vehicles but I also used it for my weekly supply run and and any other errands that required me to take inmate trustees with me. It drove ,but was real fun to drive on windy days since it had all the aerodynamics of a wall!
…Was real fun to drive on windy days since it had all the aerodynamics of a wall!
I wonder how some of the newer vans with taller stances do in this respect. I wouldn’t want to drive one over the Mackinaw Bridge, or any bridge like it. The ’99 would have had the redesign that arrived for ’92 if I’m not mistaken, but compared to how a comparable Ford Transit looks today, the ’99 would look much closer to ’70s version featured in this essay, for sure.
The handling you describe of that slot-van provides a reasonable insight into how these handle in real life. They require a certain finesse you discovered at a young age.
Long ago my father was intrigued with a very similar two-tone brown Ford van he found at Weiser Honda in Cape Girardeau (Weiser is pronounced “wheezer”, which never struck me as an ideal name for selling cars). Naturally I was curious as it was so different to the rides he had purchased but his intrigue ended rather quickly. Probably because it had an automatic transmission, radial tires, or some other such frivolity.
This is a terrific catch as the 3rd Gen Econoline is getting mighty thin on the ground these days.
“Weiser” pronounced “wheezer” is definitely not something I’d consider confidence-inspiring for a dealership name, but I suppose if that was my last name and my franchise, I’d probably want my name on it! 🙂
You’re right about these getting rarer. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had seen one prior to this one. I even see the occasional Dodge of this vintage more than the Ford.
I spent a lot of time with 2 of these. These were a big deal when they came out. The 71 Dodge B series van (and the comparable Chevy) were the first to really make inroads into the family car market but the Ford seemed a generation behind, even though it had debuted in 1969. This was a leap in refinement and was really the first big van that felt like a car inside. I expected that Dodge and Chevy would soon come out with new designs, but I would end up waiting until the 90s before one of them actually did.
A high school friend’s parents traded a strippo all-metal interior 6/3 speed 69 Ford van on a silver 1976 Custom Club Wagon. It was the mid-trim model, but it was an amazing step up. I also worked at a place with a 75 or 76 cargo model. Both of these were 351 V8 equipped and were felt like a car from the drivers seat (ok, a really tall car). The concurrent Dodge still gave you a steering wheel position that was more bus-like than car-like. Finding one of these early ones that is not a rusted mess is amazing (especially in Chicago).
And oh yes, the slot cars. My set came with a couple of F-1 cars out of the box, but I bought a series of “regular” cars. My first was the robin’s egg blue 68 Charger. Through some kind of trade with a cousin I ended up with my favorite (yet the slowest of anything I ever had) – a red 62 Ford Galaxie 500 hardtop. It ran like it had the Aurora version of the 292. 🙂
Thanks for this firsthand perspective in comparing the Dodge, Chevy and Ford vans. I think I recall having read about the bus-like driving position of the Dodge vans here at Curbside.
As far as slot cars, though, any second-generation Dodge Charger would have made me feel like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, a definite plus. Years ago, I had looked through prices of Carrera slot cars to add to my set, but they’re a little expensive and I set it up very, very infrequently. Maybe for the December holidays this year. 🙂
A friend’s family had one of these growing up. Compared to our midsize sedans it felt so impossibly huge. They had boats and snowmobiles that needed towing about so it was a good choice for them.
I had that exact same blue and white AFX Ford van, I got the custom van figure 8 race set for Christmas when I was 12 or 13. The vans use the long chassis version which has an extra gear in the drivetrain, they were not as fast as the regular AFX slot cars. Many happy hours spent playing with slot cars, thanks for the memory today!
You jog my memory that the AFX line was just coming out as I was getting to the tail end of my time with my track. I still had the old style track that used the metal locator pins on each side and the little off-white plastic “staple” that held the two pieces together. I went to the local toy/hobby store to buy a new piece of track when one got broken and had to buy a pair of adapters that would allow the replacement AFX section to link to my old track.
I still have my track and all the cars. I got it out when my kids were in grade school and we had a great time with it until the old transformer started to give up the ghost. After it started warming up the cars would get slower and slower until they would barely move, and you could feel transformer was unusually warm. I have suspected that I could get online and find a new transformer, but I have never tried.
Doug, I didn’t realize there were different chassis sizes for the Aurora cars. Thinking about it now, the Ford van did seem a little longer than the other cars we ended up buying.
I know we had at least one slot car that had “magnatraction”, but I can’t recall the body shell it carried. I was originally gifted a hand-me-down set from an older cousin that came with 2 ’67 Fords, and somewhere along the way we had a couple of Datsun 510’s as well. None of those had the “magnatraction” feature though, as a matter of fact the Datsuns had skinny little tires that were prone to slipping off their rims if they spun out in a curve. My brother, our friends and I would frequently re-body our cars, putting the shell of a known slug on the chassis of a ringer to fool each other. Better not get up to refill your cup of Country Time, because turning your back on an opponent would surely result in defeat.
It was during my slot car years (and the height of the van craze) that my father borrowed a customized ’75 Econoline, complete with side pipes, slotted mags and of course plenty of shag carpeting, to take some visiting cousins and half the neighborhood kids to see Corvette Summer at the drive-in. I think he might have been lobbying for the purchase of one for our family, but my mother would certainly have none of that. Such a quintessentially ’70’s memory. Good (and weird) times.
I love the whole slightly subversive “don’t leave your car alone” competitiveness you described! LOL That sounds like something my friends or brothers and I would have tried. All in good fun, though. (Country Time lemonade! That’s an excellent throwback, as well, though I’m aware they still make it.)
I still haven’t seen Corvette Summer and remembered it mostly because Luke Skywalker was in it, but it did look pretty cool and I was *this close* to renting it a few times. Maybe I’ll check it out.
(UPDATE: And it also has the always-great Annie Potts. Sounds like something I’ll be watching.)
These were once so common, yet as I troll my memory, I can’t recall ever driving or riding in this particular generation of Ford van. Saw plenty of ’em, but no personal experience.
I’m kind of amazed since they were so common as government and fleet vehicles and I had plenty of experience with both. No experience with van slots either. Given that slots were intended to be raced, I’m not sure I would have ever bought a van bodied slot to get the evidently rare magnawhatever option. Vans just never struck me as racers.
Vans just never struck me as racers.
This was my thought, exactly! I came to think of racing with the van as a built in “degree of difficulty”, kind of like switching the Atari 2600 to the “B” setting. Another trick the Dennis brothers pulled on one another in the middle of game play.
About 4 years ago we were looking for an inexpensive road trip vehicle that
could fit our huge 2 dog crate, our stuff etc. Ended up buying a mint condition ’77
Econoline Chateau from the original owner. It had been maintained to the nth degree,
with 2 inch folder of every receipt for all work that had been done over the years.
It was cheap too. It had two tone blue paint, and an electric blue interior that instantly
put one in a good mood. Had a lot of fun with that van, listening to Olivia Newton John.
8-Tracks and such, but it really sucked for longer trips as sustained highway speeds
were rather an exercise in endurance, at best. I sold it on ebay to a guy in Japan, and
the replacement was functionally much better, but lacked character, a frequent,
unfortunate trade off.
I’m a bit curious about that Magnatraction slot racing van. I’m not familiar with these, so my questions may be a bit obtuse. Why are the van’s rear tires “fake”, with only a narrow inner tire actually in contact with the track? Is that the case with all of these? And the “Magnatraction”? I can’t see where there are any magnets, and how they would create any additional downforce with the plastic track?
I assume that the actual “chassis” is the same for all of these cars, including those narrow real drive tires, and that everything else is irrelevant. Which makes sense, as otherwise the competition would be uneven.
I am thinking electromagnet.
I would like to think so too, but I see no evidence of them. Any magnet only works on a ferrous material, right? The track is made of plastic. The pickup “rails” may well be made of steel, but there’s no sign of anything looking like an electro-magnet underneath the car, and certainly not directly over the “rails”.
Do you see one? What would it work on?
It uses the permanent magnet in the motor. They extend down below the armature to hover over the steel pickup rails in the plastic track. In this pic the magnets are red and white:
Whereas early AFX cars had shallow magnets that did not reach to the bottom of the chassis.
So thrilled to be able to use this 40 year old knowledge 🙂
Also, in Joseph’s photo the van slot car is missing it’s rear tires. Those ones came with foam rubber tires that did not last long. What looks like a tire in that photo is just a spacer molded into the rim.
Doug, I want to thank you for answering Paul’s question! I was sitting down to read through the comments and was getting ready to find a message board on Magnatraction, but you hit on each point very well.
It has been decades since I used my brother’s AFX track, and even then, I wasn’t a pro at the ins-and-outs of the Aurora set. I had my own Tyco “Super Cliff Hangers” set later which came with glow-in-the-dark C3 Corvettes (one with blue stripes, and one with red). That was an amazing present that got a lot of use.
Aha! That all makes sense. Leave it to an engineer to explain it!
The early AFX cars had the rotor perpendicular to the track, and the stator magnets were subsequently lowered within the chassis to attract the current-bearing ‘rails’. That helped, but what really changed the game were the slightly later G+ (iirc) cars: their motors were parallel to the track, with the long stator magnets being just millimeters above the rails. You could put the car on a section of track, lift up the track, and the car would stick to it if you turned it upside down smoothly.
My little sister’s G+ F1 Elf (with FOUR front wheels) would stick to the curved track flat-out while my old Magnum funny car would fly off and nick the piano. Oh, the ignominy!
I don’t know anything about the van, but wanted to say thank you for using “nonplussed” correctly!
Haha! I’d like to think that at least one of my former English teachers has read one of my essays (even though “nonplussed” is French in origin).
Quite a bit of this write up hit home with me. I have 4 sisters and 2 brothers and my brothers are 10 and 14 years younger than I am so it often seems like we are of different generations. I can’t say for sure how much of an influence I was on my 10 year younger brother, but we often have the same taste in cars. My youngest brother? Occasionally I get the feeling he is trying to emulate his older siblings, but at other times it just seems like an act.
I remember seeing these Aurora slot car tracks when they were first offered and ” lobbied ” Santa Claus to bring me a track for nearly 2 years. When I finally got mine it was about 1963 or 64 as the cars with the track were a grey Galaxie convertible and a blue and white Falcon Sprint hardtop. I guess I must have moved on to real cars because I don’t remember the Magnatraction feature being offered. My cousins also had an Aurora track so when they visited they brought their cars with them.
As for the Econoline, I once got to drive a very tired 1st generation panel van. It was so tired that it handled corners differently depending on whether you were taking a curve to the left or the right. Or did they all do that? I came close to buying a similar van to the one pictured, about 5 -6 years ago. I needed a car and had seen this pristine Ford while walking in my neighborhood. At some point it came up for sale. This one was solid white with a blue interior and had the inline 6 cylinder engine with automatic transmission I think. I very stupidly bought my retired Police Cruiser instead.
Howard, you brought back another thing in your comment I had forgotten about. Inviting friends over who had their own slot cars, and getting to race with and against those. That was always fun.
I honestly don’t remember if I have ever driven one of these vans, or one of their type. As in, ever. I’m thinking hard. I have ridden in some conversion vans based on these, but I don’t think I’ve ever been behind the wheel. I would have no idea how a nice one is supposed to handle, but I suppose I would have been able to tell that what you had going on with that panel van you drove was just not right. LOL
You know, I have noticed that…a little…around the edges…every nigh and then.
Magna→←Traction is interesting; Lionel electric trains offered MagneTraction starting in the 1950s: magnets in the drive wheels to give the locomotives more pulling capacity.
Lionel trains – another hobby I tried and loved. I think I had more fun with building the replica buildings (which included a 7-Eleven and a Howard Johnson’s restaurant) than with the actual train, which worked only some of the time – I presume now due to connections in the track pieces that weren’t fully connected.
When I was a youngin’, I remember the debut of “G-Plus” cars. Was that before or after “Magnatraction”?
Magnatraction was a phenomenon that started in the mid-’70s, from what I’ve researched. According to Wikipedia, G-Plus arrived a couple years later from Aurora.
My first experience with one of these was a blue one that was the “sag wagon” (support vehicle) when I went on a 400 mile bike trip across Pennsylvania when I was 13 in 1976. I really liked the looks, and when I got home that summer I wood carved a mini Ford van body and fit the wheels from an unwanted Hot Wheels car.
A year or so later my parents brought one home to be our new car (quite a change grom the Vega Kammback). But it was too tall for the garage so they returned it and we ended up with a 77 Impala wagon. (After the Vega you’d think my parents would’ve been gun shy about first-year Chevy products, but it did work out this time.)
It was the the 69-74 Econoline that had the bus like wheel. The Dodges and Chevy’s were much more car like in 71. My family had a 72 Econoline Club Wagon with a 302 and automatic. Still, it had all drum brakes, twin I-beam and manual steering with 7 turns lock to lock!! The interior was bare metal and the dash was an uninviting miserable place to be. Anything above 70mph in that van was scary with all the noise and vibration and the manual steering was borderline criminal. The 75 redesign was a huge step forward.
I remember slot cars from 1964 , there was a track not far from my house, I loved to go .
In the 1990’s in Monrovia, Ca. they were just getting going revitalizing a dead town and someone opened up a slot car track in a basement store off the main drag of Myrtle, I took my then young son there and he enjoyed it .
I remember many journey’s in early Ford Econoline vans, rattling death traps and not very worm in Winter but they went along O.K. full of un seat belted kids (early 1960’s) until they rusted out after a few salty Winters .
-Nate