car race game

[hitchhiker]

I am pretty sure there was a car racing game made back in the 70's by Avalon Hill. It had one track, but several drivers such as Rick mears. It came out along with Win, Place, & Show. I would like to know the name of it.

[msjells]

USAC Auto Racing. It included the Indy track, 33 plastic cars and 33 Driver cards, which included pictures of the drivers and a chart that let them perform something along the lines of the way they did in real life.

Long before that, AH also produced a game called LeMans that contained two tracks and 12 cars. There were actually 2 different sets of 12 cars each, and play centered around deciding what "gear" (speed) to use each turn. Changing gears up or down was limited by the type of car, and you wrote your choice down before everyone moved - meaning you were sometimes going too fast and would crash into the car ahead of you when the passing lanes were blocked. Great fun!

The most popular AH racing game was Speed Circuit, originally a 3M game bought and expanded by AH. You "designed" your car before the race, giving it different characteristics in terms of speed and cornering capabilities. Along with the 3 tracks that came with the game, AH published another 12 or 15 tracks from the Grand Prix circuit.

Moderator John

[Y2UAsk]

There were some hardcore Le Mans fanatics at TSR in the late 70s and early 80s. In 1981, they organized a "24 Hours of Le Mans" game using their huge, hand-drawn track and Matchbox cars. (They ran it many years at Gencon as "8 hours of Le Mans.") This time it was an actual 24-hour game, with 16 cars, each one having a two or three-player team behind it. Weather on the track matched whatever was happening outside. We played in the basement of the old Dungeon Hobby Shop in Lake Geneva.

One of the best moments happened right out of the gate when Brian Blume, driving for Porsche in the pole position, overcooked the first turn and hit the guardrail, totaling the car.

I was on the Cunningham team. The Cunningham was an awful car for Le Mans -- all engine and no brakes, and with terrible gearing for that track. We were the last car to cross the finish line, 2.5 laps behind the lead car, which was the other Porsche. Even that wasn't too bad a finish, considering that half the field didn't finish at all from crashes or breakdowns and we had a Cunningham. It was huge fun.

Steve :D

[ May 21, 2004, 02:36 PM: Message edited by: Y2UAsk ]

[msjells]

Now THAT sounds like fun. I always remember the dread that one felt when drawing the Elva Courier from the blue deck of AH cars (the pink deck had some losers too, as I recall). This almost guaranteed you a last-place finish - it was a car that s-l-o-w-l-y built up to the worst top speed in the game, and could easily be lapped in even a four-lap race. Your best shot was to hope that everyone else crashed. I never had the skill to develop cards for cars based on real-life statistics, but that would certainly add some thrills to the game.

Moderator John