Why was the Scalextric and Aifix Auto Union yellow?

I was looking through some old Scalextric catalogues and remember being given the Scalextric AU, it was yellow as was the Airfix model. why were they not silver? Happily they are both in the toy cabinet.
Simon Thomas

I was looking through some old Scalextric catalogues and remember being given the Scalextric AU, it was yellow as was the Airfix model. why were they not silver? Happily they are both in the toy cabinet.
Simon Thomas

They weren't silver because they couldn't produce a silver coloured plastic and in those days they didn't paint the cars, I had a prototype Vanwall in a silvery grey plastic but it had streaks in it which wouldn't have been acceptable in a production model.
I did see a silver painted Auto-Union that was supposedly a prototype but there was no way of knowing who had really done it and it had the swastikas on it which they would presumably never have considered for a production model.
The white one (race-tuned version) was sort of understandable as being the correct German racing colour.
Yellow one no idea, apart from it being a colour they had available and it was different to those of the other vintage cars (except for the French version of the Alfa Romeo 8C...).

Remenber that back in the early years those Scalextrix sets were primary made to race, to collect!
The first series of plastic Scalextric cars: Vanwall, Cooper Lotus 16, lotus 21, BRM ,ferrari or sportscars like D type, lister Jaguar, Porsche, Aston Martin and they had those sidecars. from the late 50's and early 60, were all made in Green, Yellow, Red and Blue.
In the early days set were fequetly filled whit 2 cars of the same type, like a green and yellow Cooper!
and you could even buy cars like a yellow or ....a RED! Vanwall..
The Bentley was almost always Green of Black, there was a Blue Alfa Romeo, a blue Bugatti type 59 and the Auto Union was Yellow, or White as a "race tuned" version later on.

Paul Hooft

Edited by paulhooft, 05 October 2009 - 11:43.