Since Rick brought it up, I thought it only appropriate to take us back in time. I’d never heard of the book Vintage Miniature Racing by Robert Ames, but knew the Zausner title well. He sent me a copy of his book, and we did a review on it years ago, but I’ll be painted purple if I know where it is. So, I thought I’d recap it all here for you, because it ties in well with an old, old article from the paper days of Garage Style Magazine.
The cover of Issue 14, Fall 2011 depicts a three-car garage with a 1950s Corvette, a Model T, and a Ferrari 360. This place was located in the idyllic setting of a California coastal town and was one of the most interesting garages ever featured upon the pages of GSM, if for no other reason than the man who built it was very much a collector’s collector. He seemed to have a little of this and a little of that. But his real interest lay within these larger-scale toy cars he called spindizzies. Glancing through the article, I wish my pictures were better and I wish we’d printed more of the images I shot that day. Almost every picture that did get published though shows various spindizzies in the backgrounds, at the edges, and just lingering around. It really reminds me how many were there that day.
Also known as tether cars, I’d never seen them before, and I loosely compared them to the remote-control cars, something the owner smiled and agreed with to a small degree. A walking encyclopedia about them, the owner took great joy in showing me a variety of them, taking them apart to reveal their intricate engines, chassis construction, and overall intricacy – and that’s really what it was all about. The astonishing detail and micro-engineering that went into these little cars.
Then Eric Zausner sent me a copy of his book, Spindizzies, Gas-Powered Model Racers and I was able to have an even better, in-depth look, quietly and slowly able to absorb some of what these cars were all about. A Ferrari racer and general car enthusiast, Eric has over 300 of these cars in his private collection. His examination of these special cars is extensive, exhaustive and very informative, looking into their history as far back as their beginning, to their competitive racing days, to the collectability of today, and much more. The 248-page book is a fairly large rectangle measuring about 11×17 and weighs about 7-pounds. Packed with colorful photos and oodles of information about the various types of spindizzies, the early pioneers of the hobby, the various scales that became available, and much more. An absolute must have for any motoring enthusiast to further hone their knowledge of automobile history. Find the book at our friends, from Autobooks-Aerobooks. Meanwhile too, check out the original article in the magazine here.
