When Steve Bywater walked into Canberra's only slot car shop nearly 10 years ago, he managed two steps inside the door before stopping in his tracks.
"The guy sitting behind the counter said, 'Can I help you, mate?' Mr Bywater recalled.
"And I was like, 'Is there somewhere I can put a bed?'
"I basically moved in the next week and helped him build the shop into what it was when I bought it seven years ago."
Mr Bywater was one of dozens of Canberra slot car enthusiasts who competed in a 12-hour endurance race at his Mitchell shop, Way2Fast, on Saturday to mark the shop's 10th birthday.
He first developed a passion for slot cars as a child, in the days where "every second or third suburb's milk bar had a track in it".
Eventually, Mr Bywater "got to an age where real cars, kids and women got in the way".
In 2001, he dived back into the hobby and was hooked all over again.
"My kids were at the right age and I did it for the kids, but that's not what my wife says," Mr Bywater laughed.
He has a personal collection of more than 1000 slot cars, which is at the upper end of the scale among collectors but still well short of some of his mates, who have upwards of 2500.
Mr Bywater's devotion to slot cars is clear when he tells the story of buying Way2Fast in 2012 and quitting his job as a landscaper.
Being a niche business, times were tough for a while and at one stage he had to return to landscaping for about four years to keep the slot car business alive, only refocusing full-time on the shop again earlier this year.
"It's not an easy game," he said.
"But it's a passion and the joy you see on people's faces when they come in is the best thing about it.
"Sometimes they haven't seen slot cars for 30 years and they'll come in with their grandkids and it just brings the memories flooding back from when they were kids.
"And their grandkids are looking at it going, 'Holy wow, let's have some fun'. That's what it's about for me, keeping the hobby alive."
Saturday's 12-hour endurance race also served as a 20th birthday celebration for the Canberra and Region Racing and Collecting Enthusiasts club.
The club has about 20 members ranging in age from 15 to 65, and holds race meetings at Way2Fast and at members' homes.
Club member Bob Bennett has been involved for the past 19 years, but traces his interest in slot cars back to 1962.
"I woke up on Christmas Day to find a Scalextric set up on my floor," he said.
"Dad was an electrical engineer and when it didn't quite work, he fixed it. Eventually I managed to wrestle the controls away from him and have a go myself.
"I've sort of fallen in and out of love with it, as most people do with their hobbies."
Mr Bennett said he really began to reconnect with slot cars when searching for a birthday present for his son, by which time the internet had helped revive the hobby by making it easier to find slot cars than the days when you had to travel to a shop.
"A lot of people of my vintage had paid off our mortgages, or had kids, and we suddenly could buy all the things that we couldn't really afford when we were kids," he said.
Mr Bennett said unlike many other types of collecting, slot cars were a very social hobby.
"There's racing the cars, building the tracks, repairing the cars and hotting up the cars," he said.
"It's quite competitive."
As for the size of his collection?
"I've probably got more than I care to count," he laughed.
