Race-Way

Race-Way, designed by Iggy Wolverton with artwork by Jerry Kelley, was manufactured by Midway in September 1963. It's a two-player, widebody electro-mechanical machine built around an auto-racing theme, notable for its mechanical backbox animation of cars racing around a track.

The playfield features two flippers, four slingshots, seven hanging targets, and four kick-out holes, along with left and right dual outlanes. Unusually, the lower cabinet contains no motor board or mechanical components aside from a wooden box chime mounted on the left-side wall that counts laps; nearly all of the mechanical hardware is instead housed in the backbox, adding to its weight. The cabinet was advertised at 52 inches long, 27 inches wide, and 62 inches high.

Race-Way may have been influenced by the slot-car racing craze of the early 1960s, and it followed Southland Engineering's 1963 two-player "Speedway," an actual slot-car-track pinball that also counted laps for each player. Midway offered Race-Way in Replay and Regular models, and soon after released the similar two-player "Champ" with the same playfield and nearly identical backbox -- likely a correction of an inconsistency in how Race-Way's tilt mechanism ended the game for one or both players.