Today I finished Russell Ingall’s Castrol VT Commodore that raced in this one-off “Magnatec” livery at Canberra’s GMC 400 in 2000. Build Diary below.
pic – Southern Sky PhotographicsA Classic Carlectables Monroe Safety Car (certificate #0095 of 4000) was sacrificed for this Code 3 project. I had considered using the Biante VX as a donor, just because it’s such a great model, but the car that’s being recreated is a VT, so the old Classics ‘brick’ VT would have to do.
Yes, it’s the same car, but with a set of wheels off a Classic Carlectables VX. Classics’ VX had a far better shaped wheel & nut combo, plus rubber tyres and brake discs. There’s also a fair bit of work taken place on the rear wing, removing unnecessary material and rounding off the leading edge.Body colour applied. Metallic paint at this scale is a bitch, and the paint colour on this thing is bizarre. The colour that was suggested to me appeared way too dark and did not match photos or video I’d seen of the real car. I tried various shades before deciding on the one seen here, which I still dont believe is 100% correct, but will have to do.Part way through the decalling stage. I acquired the decals for this project several years ago, but didn’t bother to check them too hard at the time. I now wish I had as many of the markings are poorly scaled (some oversized, some undersized) and some are missing.The decal supplier must have assumed people would use the standard release Ingall SLX Commodore for the donor – which I clearly haven’t! The decal sheet did not include the red banners for the front and rear winscreens, so I had to jump on ebay and source another Ingall SLX machine just to get the window insert, shown above with the cleaned and polished item from the Monroe car.Decals done, window trim, grill etc touched up with semi-glass black. Ready for assembly, which is very straight forward on these old ‘bricks’ from Classics.Finished model. As per my other Code 3s, it’s not 100% accurate, but still a nice addition to the collection that looks more than fine among its siblings in the display cabinet.
Front view. Blacked-out grill, brake and radiator intakes are painted by hand.Rear view. The red lenses of the tail lights protruded into the boot face, which is wrong, so part of them had to be hand painted.
