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| My name is Tim Leppert and I will be your reporter for this journey through the Kansas City slot world. Just for some background, I moved to this area in 1990 for job reasons. My wife is a web site coordinator for a large health care company, and I am a journeyman tool & die maker. We moved here from the buckle of the rust belt, Toledo, Ohio. And we were very happy to find the nicest people and surroundings. As soon as I got settled in the area, I tried to find the local clubs and tracks to support the habit, and ran into the biggest and most After talking to Don Bourn, Art Walts and Steve Godinez about the local oval racing scene, or lack of it, I decided to try to find a good oval track group and found a rag-tag bunch that fit my skills a little better. This group still doesn't have a name and still is rag-tag. But we race on some of the biggest routed ovals man has ever seen. and it is great fun. This bunch races AFX M.T.s with custom wound arms, for parity, and hard NASCAR style bodies. We commonly run 150 lap races and end up with 3-5 cars on the lead lap. It can take you 20 laps to complete a pass! As soon as I discovered this group, one of the members wanted to rout his own track and I wanted to help. we set about deciding the shape and I designed the layout. after working through the fixtures and tooling, we cut and laid down a replica of The Monster Mile, at Dover. Six lanes, continuous rail, 20 degree banks, 5.5 foot radius turns, in short, AFX heaven. | |||||||||||||||
| With this one in the bag, I set out to rout my own little slice of heaven, A six lane routed replica of Martinsville. This one turned out just as good and is my pride and joy.In the middle of all of this, I met one of the nicest guys I know, Howard Kilgore. He is "Mister H.O." in these parts. When we finished my track, he expressed an interest in a routed road course. We Talked it over and decided it wasn't the time to try this and Howard proceeded to build a true artistic work, | |||||||||||||||
| After the road course deal fell through, I was looking at some well deserved time off from the track designing and tooling stuff only to be approached by our club president, Dan Townsend. He wanted to see if we could build a replica of the new Kansas Speedway for a commercial venture. I told him if we threw enough money at it, anything's possible. So he decided to go for it and we started layout and found a shop to do the routing for us. Dan quit his job and started Slot Car Thunder in the lounge of a local bowling alley. He quickly outgrew the bowling alley and rented space in a small strip mall in Bonner Springs, Kansas. He plans to be up and running around the1st of October. At the moment we have three tracks waiting to be erected and a fourth in the design stage which will be announced at the grand opening. But it will be the granddaddy of them all. Thank you all for the read, and please feel free to reply with any questions or comments. | |||||||||||||||
| Thunder Jet Valley | |||||||||||||||
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| Mission Motor Complex | |||||||||||||||
| The Mission Motorplex. A nicer and more challenging road course, hasn't been seen by me. Howard then decided, along with John Habernal, Gary Merrifeild and Malcome McIntire, to start a T-Jet club in the area. This definitely got the Aurora juices flowing and pretty soon, they were pulling 15-18 racers a night. Great fun is being had buy all, and this year we are trying to get together a team for the fray. The guys from Rick Philis' group are coming here in November to taste some K.C. style barbecue t-jet racing. | |||||||||||||||
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