Williams FW11

The Williams Honda FW11, the dominating car of the 1986 F1 season with Williams winning the Constuctors championship with 9 wins & 20 Podiums from drivers Nigel Mansell (5 wins) & Nelson Piquet (4 wins), With Piquet clinching the Drivers chapionship from Mansell by 2 points.

This model as usual is by Tamiya in 1/20 scale. Quite an old model and quite rare and hard to get hold of.
Being an old model the white decals had yellowed, a good trick with yellowed white decals is to leave them in the sun to bleach the yellow out. So i put the decal sheet in a plastic clear bag and stuck it to the window.
Just in case it didnt work i decided to buy a sheet of decals from Indycals.net, Although in the US their decals are fairly cheap to import over to the UK. I heard some good and bad things about thier decals but decided to give them a try.
However my experience of them wasn't so good. some of the decals need to go over some bumps in the bodywork and i just couldnt get them to smooth over properly, or fit right.
In the end i stripped them all off back to the paint and decided to use the original ones, the bleaching had worked quite well although not perfect. The Tamiya decals then went on so much better.

During building the instructions tell you to fit the front suspension through this seperate piece of the monocoque (see photo) then attach to the main part. Doing it this way leaves gaps that wasn't there on the original car. Once this is done its then not possible to fill the gaps to hide them.
So i decided to glue the piece in place, fill the gaps and paint it, then when ready cut up the pieces of the suspension and glue in place. The following photos show the process, and im sure youll agree it looks far better this way.

     1. How it's supposed to work                2. The two parts                             3. Together but with gaps

              4. Gaps filled in                            5. Filler all sanded down              6. Primed and painted White


The livery for this car comprises of three main colours, white, yellow and blue. The blue is taken care of by the decals but the others need to be painted. This was the first time i've had to mask up a model and paint two colours. It wasnt too difficult this time around as the joins between the white and yellow are covered by the blue decal. But still, it went well and i was happy with my first masking attempt.

There were a couple of minor extra details on this model.

I used photo etched screw heads to cover the joining pins on the endplates of the rear wing.

Also this kit came with some wire to replicate the spark plug cables.

One problem with the kit, being old you cant expect everything to be perfect(as with the yellowed decals), the engine cover is warped and doesn't sit flush, i tried to fix it but i didn't get it 100%. You'll see in the last photo.

Ferrari 640 (F189)

This is the Ferrari 640, otherwise known as the F189, (yet again made by Tamiya) as seen at the 1989 Portuguese Grand Prix.
Driven by Nigel Mansell and Austrian Gerhard Berger. Ferrari won 3 races that year with Mansell getting 2(Brazil, Hungary), Bergers only win was at Portugal(although ive done the model as Mansells car).
Although the car was quite innovative being the first car to use a Semi-Auto gearbox, it was plagued with unreliability. Of the 30 races the 640 started it finished only 9 with 19 Retirements(7 Mansell, 12 Berger) and 2 disqualifications for Mansell. In the races it did finish it never finished below 3rd place.
Despite the problems Mansell came 4th in the WDC and Ferrari came 3rd in the Constructors.


A pretty straight forward model with one major gripe, the body shell doesnt quite line up with the monocoque around the nose, and you can easily see this in the photos. There was no way around this as moving the red side panels on the monocoque up higher to match the body wouldve only left a gap on the part surrounding the front suspension, so im putting it down to a design fault on Tamiyas part :).
Not many decals on this car, but the Marlboro logos with the drivers name on didnt have the Marlboro wording, just a white space so using some decal paper i printed my own "Marlboro" words and added them. I think it looks much better with them on.

Lotus 99T

The Lotus 99T was used during the 1987 F1 season.

Driven by Ayrton Senna & Satoru Nakajima it acheived 1 Pole(San Marino) and 2 wins(Monaco, Detroit) all by Senna. Lotus came 3rd in the Constructors Championship while Senna and Nakajima came 3rd and 12th in the Drivers championship.

(Click photos to enlarge)