About Fred

Fred Hood has been building and racing slotcars longer than almost anyone in the world.

Fred started out when slotcars first appeared in 1956. He was introduced to slotcars through a friend who had got a Scalextric kit for Christmas. Helping his friend to wear out his cars, Fred soon decided he wanted to get his own, and discovered a 4 lane wooden track in the back room of a local hobby shop, and the group of guys that hung out and raced there. The racing was all crash and burn type racing, with 1/32nd scale Formula One cars. Being a lot younger than most of the other racers, once Fred got things figured out, his youthful reflexes proved no match for the other racers, and he won consistently. From there Fred traveled all over the Bay area to wherever he could find any groups of racers.

While reading Rod and Custom magazine one day he discovered that there was organized racing in Southern California, and out of that some loosely organized racing started in Nor Cal. In the late 60’s Nor Cal USRA was formed and a strong racing circuit around the Nor Cal area was formed. With the ever growing competition  technology and development the “Thingie” cars were born.

In 1967 Fred and Jim Wells traveled to So-Cal to Classic raceway to watch a So-Cal event. After that Nor-Cal started to run to the So-Cal USRA rules. At a race in Sacramento where Fred was leading comfortably, he became a rider and destroyed his car. Lee Gilbert took the win, and was so impressed with Fred that he invited Fred to join him in regular trips down to So-Cal to run in the USRA series, running Bob Green Horsepower and Lee’s chassis.

Fred went on to become a force in both Nor-Cal and So-Cal racing, traveling all around California wherever he could find a place to race, always running at or near the front of the field.

In 1971 Fred joined Team Camen, racing mainly in the Nor-Cal series, and still to this day races for Team Camen.

In 1990 Fred won the Western States Group 7 Championship, and also became a multi time Nor-Cal Champion. He also ran every year at the USRA Nats.

Fred has always been a top wing racer, and really had not raced scale cars until 1985 when 1/32nd scale Eurosport was introduced. Fred borrowed a car, and managed to make the main, where Team Camen racer Jon Laster helped him out to get the car more competitive for the main event. The tips and help Jon gave Fred that day helped Fred to a strong 2nd place behind Jon in the main, and Fred was on his way to becoming a Scale Racer.

With no scale racing series in Nor-Cal, Fred started Nor-Cal IMCA which became a strong Eurosport based series around the Nor-Cal region. About this time a 1/24th Eurosport class was created , and Fred became on the the leading competitors in that.

By 1993 Fred had stopped serious Wing racing, as it was becoming a motor building war, so he started   racing all kinds of scale cars with an occasional wing race, including the emerging flexi cars.