Land Speed Record Toy Cars

Tuesday, January 7, 2014
     (Cold, sunny, and strong winds)

Land Speed record Toy Cars

   With the news reporting a phrase that I never heard before (Arctic Polar Vortex), and also reporting record-breaking and dangerous temperatures, the word record entered my thinking for today. I'd written before about these beautiful cars, but I decided to reintroduce them.  

   From the beginning of  the) invention of the car, sped records of course had to be broken.By the 1920's cars were becoming strong, bigger, and faster, and of course, so were the cars build for speed. If you lived in those times and could afford a newspaper, or a radio (no TV's them), you'd have heard about Malcolm Campbell, a British racing driver. One of the places that racers and cars would go to was Daytona, Florida (USA) where there were flat, dense and wide sandy beaches to race cars. And this was where Malcolm broke several records.  Each year, cars would come back to Daytona to break the previous year's record. When I was growing up in the 1950's , Malcolm's son Donald continued the tradition by also racing, but I'll stop here.

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 Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

The Kingsbury toy company was located in New Hampshire, USA), and produced lots of wonderful toys.Sadly the company closed as a toy company but continues to this day in success with other manufacturing endeavours. If you look at the undercarriage of the golden race car below, you'll will see their "trademarked" wind-up mechanism.Almost every one of their wind-up toys can instantly be recognized by this design, and most work to this day!

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

Malcolm Campbell's record-breaking car was in fact painted blue.

Those silver-painted rectangles on each side of the driver are (I believe) radiators to cool the huge engine. WHen you look at the scale of the driver in proportion to the car, you can get a sense of the size of this racer!

Thanks for visiting, stay bundled warm,

and have a great part of the day wherever you may be.

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com