The fastest slot car racer I ever saw? That would have to be a kid named Shanny.
   I thought of him yesterday as I was pushing a shopping cart round the IGA and spotted an end-of-aisle display of those bagged marshmallow bananas and marshmallow strawberries. I remember I liked those for a short time as a kid  but they don’t look too appealing to me now except in a prurient kind of way.
   Definitely the fastest I ever saw wield a controller, that was Shanny. . .no contest. The only adjective other than fast that would describe the kid properly would have to be ‘scruffy’. A good haircut seemed to be somewhere in his future,  but that future apparently never came. Long unkempt hair wasn’t all that uncommon in the late sixties at the beginning of the hippie era, ‘cept Shanny wasn’t a hippie by his own admission. Gawd, he sure was one hell of a slot car racer, a definition the club hung on him by acclamation after that first night we all saw what he could do.
   It was Tony Lai who first brought the kid round to an SVMRC meeting. See, the Clarke Park 1/32nd club Tony had belonged to had closed down after the house in which their basement track was located had been sold by the parents of one of the members. So Tony, and another of his friends whose name I can’t remember, Doug Something? drifted on over to the SVMRC, the South Vancouver Model Racing Club, which was us. Tony fit in right away with the SV’s, as we called ourselves. He was a pleasant kid with a knack for building and racing a mean slot car although his building prowess slightly overshadowed his racing  skills . . . just a little.
   Wasn’t very long before Tony was telling us about a kid he had recruited for the Clarke Park circuit after  running into in him in down Cambie St. one day at Phil’s Hobby Shop. Seemed Phil told Tony  the kid was pretty fast. His name was Shanny, short for Shannon something, I dunno. At Tony’s invitation, he showed up at the Clarke circuit sporadically but had no cars, so he would borrow someone else’s back up car and just proceed to fly around the track.”He is REAL quick,” Tony added, “But maybe a bit of an oddball.”
   I guess I should have asked him what he meant by that. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Tony came up to me one night in October ’67 and said he had bumped into the kid on the street the day before and got to talking with him, mostly about slots of course.
   “Would it be alright?” he asked me, if he invited Shanny to an SV club meeting. “We’ve never locked the door on anyone yet.” I told him (which immediately brought to mind at least one guy I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen to.) Tony grinned and went to change the motor in the  Ferrari 330P in his hand from which curls of thin smoke were coming after a test run.
   For about a month there was no sign of this kid with the magic thumb and we began to wonder if Tony had been putting us on. Then, one cold November evening, Tony did show up with the kid riding double on the bar of his bicycle. Shanny appeared to be about seventeen, same age as Tony, with long dirty blond unkempt hair and the straggly beginnings of a first time beard on his upper lip and chin. His jeans were tattered at the bottom and torn at the knees and the laces of his running shoes trailed his footsteps like remoras behind a shark. O, and he was wearing a bleached flannel shirt at least three sizes too big for his thin body. He was a quiet kid, shy appearing, which we were to find out was indeed the case, and his hand movements were sure and quick. Didn’t say much but smiled a lot and there was something about those eyes of his.  If angels existed, they would have eyes like Shanny’s, like he was seeing things no one else could see. It gave you the impression he wasn’t exactly completely present even though he was standing right there in front of you. It wasn’t eery but it was a little strange and one of the club members in particular, Dave Craster,  took a mild dislike to the kid right away.
   Like Tony had said, Shanny didn’t own any cars of his own. Hadn’t brought along anything at all and definitely nothing looking like a race case; nothing except a bulge in his shirt pocket out of which the top of an open plastic bag could be seen. Tony let him use a brass pan Cheetah with a Champion 507 motor in it.
   We all knew the car well. That Cheetah was the orneriest car anyone had ever seen, sort of a misfit among slot cars. It seemed happiest on silicone slicks but after a few laps it would suddenly pop out of the slot for no apparent reason; in a corner, in the middle of a  straight, uphill, downhill . . . there just wasn’t any consistency. Drop guides didn’t cure the problem, nor did a hinge in the pan. Everything Tony tried seemed to have no effect whatsoever. We took to calling it the slot car from hell. I suggested the thing was haunted by the ghost of its real life counterpart which got a short chuckle. Someone else said it was the devil’s car and ought to be consigned to the fiery furnace from which it had obviously sprung. Tony took all our ribbing with a smile of resignation and kept on trying to make that Cheetah behave. He tried foam slicks with Tiger Juice. That helped for a few laps until the thing lost traction and became squirrelly out of the corners and soon was wagging its tail all over the track. Not even Snail Slime worked  and eventually Tony lost all patience with it and had to give up on it.  It had been some weeks since we had seen it on the track even for a test run.
   Tony dropped the Cheetah into the red lane which was the inside lane for the hairpin at the end of the straight and known by everyone as the slowest lane on our track. The other three lanes were in use by Gord Stinson setting up his Porsche FI, Willie Norton’s 250GTO and I was tooling around in the blue lane with my trusty Chaparral. When we saw the thing in the red lane the rest of us looked at each other, some with puzzled looks, some with knowing smiles. Whatever happened, this was gonna be interesting.
   I didn’t see any Tiger Juice come out so I assumed the car was running the silicones it always ran best on. Made sense . . . at least the kid would get a few laps in before visiting the tules. Tony plugged in an MRRC controller for the kid. This brought more looks among us and a low murmur began. He definitely wasn’t making this easy for the kid. In our time we had all bought at least one of the MRRC’s and after a couple tries consigned it to spare duty hoping that time of need would never come. MRRC’s had way too high a resistance for something like the Champion motor in the Cheetah. That motor needed a 15 ohm or maybe even a 12. The MRRC was about a 25 or 30 ohm. I’ve seen more than one of those blue things melt in someone’s hand right before my eyes. The car, the controller . . . none of it made sense. No one else would have tried it. The potential for looking foolish was just too great.
   Shanny threw his hair back out of his eyes with a toss of his head and thumbed the controller a couple of times, looked at the blue thing in his hand with a funny look on his face, then at the Cheetah as it jumped forward, stopped and then forward again. He took it around the track slow for one lap, the car jerking from corner to corner, getting used to the controller more than the car it seemed. I was wondering how long it would be before that controller got too hot to hang onto.
   Shanny ran one more lap, a little faster this time. He kept looking at the controller and once at Tony  beside him who shrugged. He brought the car around the curve before the finish and stopped. We all expected he would either ask for a different controller or just give up, but he fooled us all. He reached into that bulging shirt pocket and something yellow came out in his hand, visible for just a split second before he popped it into his mouth and pushed the controller plunger down at the same time. The Cheetah took off down the start straight just like it always did and Shanny stuck his neck out like he maybe had a little vulture blood in his breeding, chewing away as he watched the car brake for the hairpin at the last possible second. It seemed to go through that inside lane of the hairpin a little quicker than I’d ever seen any car go before. Then it accelerated into the uphill left-hander, now in the outside lane, and through the long sweeper which was an uphill left and down again into the notorious esses almost in front of the lane stations across the table.
   The Cheetah always did love the esses. It was the one place it seemed to shine even for Tony. Still in an outside lane it flew through yet another left-hander which became the inside lane of a flat tight corner which was harder to negotiate than it looked because it was a decreasing radius into a chicane and finally into the right-hand corner leading into the straight and Start/Finish.
   Shanny reached into that shirt pocket again as the Cheetah went by, popped another one of those things into his mouth and flew around the track for another lap, then another and soon it was six and still there was no sign of the Cheetah wanting to lift its nose out of the slot. Every lap as it came by, he would reach into the shirt for one of those whatsits. In their brief appearance I noticed that some of them were red, some yellow. But they disappeared too fast to identify. It was an incredible show of driving, most especially with a car and controller none of us watching would ever touch for any reason. And, dammit! in the red lane, too!
   After three or four laps there was no one else running on the track. I took my Chaparral off and I saw Gord and Willie lift their cars, too. Shanny didn’t seem to notice that his was the only car or that he and the Cheetah were the centre of our attention. We had
never set up a timing system on the track; what we did was line the cars up, switch the power on for  a predetermined amount of time, depending on what kind of race it was, switch off and change  lanes and do that four times until everyone had run in all four lanes and the one with the most  laps plus segments out of ten won the race. Tonight was just a test session after a meeting and the power was left on until we had all done our testing. We had no way of knowing just exactly  how fast the kid was without setting up some kind of race.
   Still, we all of us knew we were seeing something pretty special. No  one doubted it was the fastest any car had ever gone around the red lane in the track’s history. It also pretty much meant that it was going to go a hell of a lot faster once it got into the  other, quicker lanes. We were watching a slot car racer at work, a real slot car racer. It brought  home to all of us that we had just been playing at being racers with our close battles for club  supremacy. Here was a kid who could, and no doubt would, blow us all away like the amateurs we had  just become. And with a decent controller? That would pretty well settle it.
   After twenty or so laps, more than the Cheetah had ever done in the  past without de-slotting, the kid brought it in, stopped in front of Tony and swallowed noisily.  Maybe his bag of whatsits was empty, I thought. We were all quiet for a few seconds. Then we heard  voice from the marshal’s post up at the top of the left-hand sweeper. It was Dave  Craster, another recent addition to the club (seemed the SV’s were the be-all, catch-all for the  members of clubs/tracks which no longer were.)  “I though you weren’t supposed to eat at trackside,” Craster said.
   He was right of course; it was a club rule common to all slot car  tracks in so far as we knew. Food brought to trackside had a way of getting into the slots, pop got  spilled and sometimes cans or cups even got put down too close to the outside blue lane and were  run into by a car causing damage not only to the car jumping off the track but also to the track  when the liquid shorted the  tape out. Once I saw a Ram controller go up in smoke when a small axle  nut wrench fell down unnoticed and shorted out the green lane. That happened to Willie Norton  and it wasn’t his wrench which had caused the fault so he was not too pleased at having to  buy a new resistor for the Ram. Actually, we never did find out who owned the culprit wrench  but that’s another tale.
   Shanny didn’t say a word, just handed the controller back to Tony and  nodded. Tony picked up the Cheetah and turned it over. Sure enough it was wearing the notorious  silicone slicks on the rear wheels. He looked up and down the track and then at Shanny who was  looking somewhere with those eyes of his, a dumb look on his face. He reached into the  shirt pocket and pulled out a red marshmallow strawberry. He looked at the confection and put it back  into his pocket.
   “Well?” Craster said. He was not a likeable man. When I mentioned earlier about how I might like to maybe lock the door on someone, it was him I was referring to.  Give him his due, Dave Craster was known as the ‘concours man’, noted for the dedication to  scale and fine detailing and finish of his cars.  He was also somewhat disdainful of those of us  who built strictly for speed alone . . . although still in scale I might add.  I was always  impressed by the appearance of Dave’s cars. I knew there was never a chance in hell that I could ever  build a car that could compete with his in any concours. Dave was also a poor loser, both in  concours contests and on the track.
   I’ve got to be honest. It entered my mind for sure that the kid would  be a great addition to the SVMRC when it came to inter-club racing. We all of us liked to race  almost as much as we liked to win. Racing was good, but winning was just a little bit better if you  know what I mean. Hell, I knew those marshmallow thingies were 99.9% air and light as a feather.  There wasn’t a chance in the world that one of them dropped on a track could either short  anything out or cause a car to fly off . Still, Craster was insistent. A rule is a rule or it isn’t a  rule. If we let one rule go, where would we stop?
   “Jeez!” Dave said. “He doesn’t HAVE to eat while he’s racing, does  he?”
   It was Tony who answered.
   “I’ve never seen him drive without a pocket full of those marshmallow  things,” he said. “I’ve never seen him eat one except while racing.”
   “That’s just plain ridiculous,” said Craster. He had a point there.  It was a little odd if you thought about it, but then we all had odd habits, Craster being a case  in particular, like when it came to scale and realistic looking cars. I better not get into that.
   The kid didn’t run again that night. About a month later, getting  close to Christmas, he showed up again. We were just setting up a practice race, sort of a serious  warm-up for the Richmond GP which was going to happen right after the New Year, the first race of 1968. Tony and Shanny both entered. Tony gave the kid his Ferrari 330P which now had a  Champion 507 motor just like
the Cheetah. He also gave Shanny a Cox controller instead of the MRRC so  we all knew that we might not be winning as many heats as we’d thought earlier. . . if any.
   And sure enough Shanny cleaned up the track with all of us. winning  his heat race with a 60.9, about 1.2 faster than anyone had ever gone in a four minute heat before.  Mostly I was working at the lap counter station so I had a good view of the track and the  drivers. I never saw Shanny eat or put anything into his mouth the whole time. There weren’t going to be  any arguments tonight,
I thought. I wondered how Tony had convinced the kid he didn’t have to eat the marshmallows while he was racing. The upcoming Richmond GP was going to be something  else. Everybody was happy for the kid and for our club, you could see it in their eyes.  The only thing left was to convince Shanny he should join the SV’s and to make sure he showed up on  race day.
   The kid’s heat race time meant he went straight into the A-main, the  only one to do so. The rest of us had to fight our way through quarter finals and semi-finals  until at last there were four of us lined up for the final after the consolation had been run. So on the line was Shanny with Tony’s Ferrari, Willie Norton, Dave Craster (who had borrowed a car from  one of his buddies ... he really was a pretty good driver with a decent car), and Bo  Woodbody, whose car for once hadn’t fried its armature (Bo had a thing for five-poleVarney motors he  had rewound himself . . . fast but fragile, maybe foolish, too, the 3 F’s).
   It was just plain bad luck that Craster got the red lane first in the  draw. The hairpin at the end of the main straight proved to be a disaster for him and he was  something like a half lap behind everyone when it came time to change lanes. Rattled now, he didn’t do  much better in the outside blue lane. Shanny had moved to that dreaded inside red lane for  his second session and still managed to lap Craster just before the power went off signifying  the half way point of the race.
   Now it was usual to take a short break at that point, just a little longer than the usual thirty seconds you got to get your controller hooked up in your next lane. No one could work on their cars or even move them . . . the marshals always did that. It was just a seventh inning stretch so to speak. Long enough to get rid of some of the tension. I was running  the power station and lap counter for the final, something I seemed to do regularly. It made not  making the final a little easier to take having something to do. I put my hand on the power switch and called out,
“Everybody ready?”
   I saw Shanny’s hand move, which I assumed meant he was. He wasn’t the  most talkative of kids. Three other voices said, “Yes.” so I threw the switch.   Less than a minute later I heard Craster’s voice, “Shut off the  power!”
  “What’s wrong?” I said. I wasn’t going to shut it down without  hearing a reason.
   “He’s eating those damn marshmallows!” Craster said. “I just hit one  of them with my car!”
   I made a note of the time and flipped the power switch off.  “Bo? Willie?” I said.
   Bo reached under the overpass and held up a strawberry marshmallow. “That fell out of his hand right in front of my car,” said Craster,  “and I hit it!”
   “Your car’s not hurt,” I heard Willie’s raspy voice say. Willie was  short and seemed to be hiding behind Craster. Unless he leaned forward, he was hard to see.
   “That’s not the point!!” Dave said. Did I mention he had a temper as well as being a poor loser. “He should be disqualified!”
   Everyone but Shanny turned to look at me. While I was at the power  station I was also the race steward. That didn’t mean I couldn’t ask someone else for their opinion if I wanted but this
seemed simple enough. I just had to ask a couple of questions.   “Who else saw this?” I said.
   I saw Shanny lean forward and pick up his Ferrari. He turned it over, looked at the bottom and spun the front wheels then put it back where it had stopped when I cut  the power.
   “I saw it bouncing down the track after Dave hit it,” Willie rasped.  “That’s all I saw.”
   “Me, too,” said Bob, “but we were all watching our cars. No time to  see anything else.”
   “Well?” Craster said. “What are you going to do about it?”   There was only one thing I could do but I gave it a few seconds to  look like I was putting some thought into it. I looked around the room. Everyone except Shanny was  looking at me. I cleared
my throat.   “Sorry, Shanny,” I said. My voice had turned husky. This wasn’t  something I wanted to do.
“But you’re disqualified.”  “Damn straight,” Craster said. There was satisfaction in his voice. I  never liked him less than at that particular moment.  “Give it a rest, Dave,” Willie said. Dave glared at him but kept  quiet.  “Hey!” Tony said. “Nobody else saw anything except for Dave. How come  you’re taking his word for it?”
   Shanny looked right through me. Those angel eyes had turned dark. He  shrugged and pulled the plug on his controller.
   “This is bull****,” he said. It was the longest sentence I ever heard  come out of him. He handed the controller to Tony, gave him a faint smile, turned and walked  out the basement door.  “Hey!” I said, but the door closed behind him.  Tony was putting his equipment into his race case with a determined look on his face. He walked up to me and said, “Craster put that thing on the track, you  know.”
   “That doesn’t matter,” I said to him. “I.....” Tony wasn’t listening.  He turned and went out the door, slamming it behind him.
   Willie and Bob were staring at Dave. Their expressions spoke volumes.
   “What?” Craster said. “I did not!” He looked at me for support.
   “Doesn’t matter,” I said again. “I didn’t disqualify him because of  the marshmallow.”
   The other two of them swung their faces toward me, too. Puzzlement filled their faces.
   “What are you talking about?” It was Gordie, from the marshals station at the uphill sweeper.
   “He moved his car,” I said. My voice really was getting husky. I was thinking we were never going to see the kid again, maybe Tony, too. I wasn’t sure which I was  going to miss more.
   “Yeah. That’s right,” Gord said. “I saw him do it but it didn’t  register. He picked it up and put
it down again.” He shook his head and frowned. “I saw him do it but . . .”
   “I’m declaring this a non-race.” I said. I cleared the lap counters and turned off the main switch powering both the track and the control panel.
   “Hey!” Bob said. He was the only one I could maybe sympathize with a little. It was the first final I had ever seen that rewound Varney in. Unless Bo had discovered  some secret at last it was doubtful I would see it in another. Well, maybe Willie, too, except he  made more finals than either of the other two and would likely make more in the future.
   Dave Craster was livid.
   “You can’t do that!” he shouted.   “Sue me,” I said.
   Everyone in the room was preparing to call it a night . . . except  for Craster who obviously thought bluster was going to make someone change his mind if he kept it  up long enough. All I knew was it wasn’t going to work on me.    The members started drifting out the door with goodbyes-see -ya-next-time on their lips. They weren’t a happy crowd but I had a feeling it would all be history by the  next meeting. Dave Craster could probably be included in that feeling, too. Craster was always the last one to finish putting his cars away in their velvet lined cubicles in his case. As he reached for the doorknob, I said, “I think you did put  that thing on the track, Dave.”
   “You can’t prove that,” he said, which pretty much told me my guess  was right.
   “I really think you should find someplace else to race,” I said. “I  can’t make you but think about it real hard before you come back here again.”
   He mumbled and unintelligible reply and closed the door behind him. Well, I said to myself as I turned off the lights. I opened the door,  turned the inside knob lock and stood for a minute. I had disqualified what was probably the fastest  slot car racer I might ever see, the best builder I’d ever met, as well as alienating Dave  Craster who would take his model-building skills to another club. Quite a night’s work, I said to  myself. I had done the right thing and now I was going to have to pay for it, or rather the club  was..I sighed and pulled the door closed on its lock.
   “Rules is rules,” I said quietly.
    It had a hollow ring.