Subaru Impreza WRC
Years ago, at a Foroslot I bought a complete Scalextric Subaru Impreza WRC but without an engine. I can't confirm it but I think it was a decoration for the collectibles that Altaya released around 2004 or 2005, I'm not sure. At that time I liked rally cars a lot, now not so much, and those from Tecnitoys were leading cars in rallyslot, I think I have already commented on it at another time. The rallyslot was about to take the leap in quality and competitiveness that began when Ninco fitted its rally cars with NC5 motor on sale and prior to the arrival of technical chassis and anglewider motor arrangement back in 2007 thanks to manufacturers like Spirit and especially Avant Slot, at which time a radical change occurred in the rallyslot. The performance of the production cars took a qualitative leap, reaching levels practically equal to those of the prepared cars, especially the Group A, the WRCs were still light years away from the rest of the rallyslot cars. The group N stopped being simple cars as they had been until now to become very competitive machines despite the preparation limitations imposed by the regulations.
The Subaru Impreza WRC was therefore an "old school" slot car from the early 2000s. Tecnitoys reproduced almost all the WRC cars from those years and in Spain the rally has always been an automobile category with a lot follow-up, and still is. These slot cars were still largely a toy and much less a hobby, contrary to what which would happen with many of the later slot cars, but it is a nice car and a good 1/32 scale reproduction of the car with which Peter Solberg participated in the 2003 Monte Carlo rally, where he retired by accident, but at the end of the season gave him great satisfaction in the form of a world championship. The proportions of the car are very correct, being a relatively large car with a somewhat tall and heavy body, which penalized it on slot tracks. But From my point of view, an obvious defect in this particular reproduction is the color, a blue/purple color that does not resemble nothing like the blue with which the Subaru team painted its official cars. It is perhaps the most negative point of reproduction but in this case I am going to ignore it, because I do not intend to make a faithful reproduction, but rather an improvement with little work on a pretty good car but it lacks a little detail. This is the car I'm talking about:
The images are not of very good quality, and do not allow you to appreciate the wrong blue tone in which the body is painted, but it does allow us to see that it is a good reproduction that mainly lacks some color details, especially in the headlights and the interior. We can correct those details ourselves, and that is what I am going to do, dividing the work in three parts:
- Simple mechanical modifications.
- Interior decoration.
- Body decoration.
I started with the mechanics, as I always like to do in any work with a slot car, because it is the most important thing, the car has to move around the track in the best way possible. In the images the car does not appear with the original heels, but with Ninco axles with the same model of multi-spoke rim. It's not that the original wheels were poorly reproduced, on the contrary, but I liked Ninco's a little better. In addition, I wanted to mount some Ninco calibrated axles, with a 24-tooth crown on the front axle and another with 27 teeth on the rear, as was done in the preparations of the Group A rallyslot cars at the time, so that the front axle rotated faster than the rear and thus got out of the corners better. The following image shows the chassis with the Ninco axles and tires mounted. Regarding the tires, I put low profile ones on the front axle (from Team Slot) and Spirit ones on the rear axle, which work very well on the Ninco slot track. Regarding the motor, to make the car run fast, I put a Scalextric Proturbo 4x4 in it, which gives about 18,000 RPM at 14 volts.
The mechanics did not require any further modification, so I focused on the interior decoration. The drivers tray was not a paragon of beauty and detail, as is the case with the bodywork. I suspect that since it was a car that was sold in a collectible by installments, they did not worry excessively about detailing the interior.
The good thing about a tray like this is that we can do the detailing to our liking and that is what I did. After dismantling the interior, which was reduced to removing the pilots and the anti-roll bar. I applied a coat of primer because it was a plastic injected tray without any decoration.
I painted the pilot and co-pilot trying to get as close to reality as possible, using Vallejo acrylic colors. Actually the most difficult part of this step was finding images of Solberg and Mills to see what their helmets looked like since the race suit was much easier to guess. Fortunately, searching the internet I found some videos from the time where the decoration of the helmets was clearly seen to make something similar at 1/32 scale as shown in the following image:
I painted the tray in a blue tone similar to that of the body, but as I said, it is not the same blue tone as the real car. Curiously, I had a couple of cans from the manufacturer Zero Paints and I want to talk about this specific tone. Zero Paints makes some paints that it calls solvent-based acrylic paints that are honestly good for decorating scale model cars, since the tones are practically the same as the real car, in fact, the exact tones for certain cars or decorations appear on their website. In this case I had two cans of Subaru blue, one more purple, similar to the tone in which the slot car was painted, and another lighter identical to the real car. The most curious thing about the matter is that both blues had the same reference (ZP-1041) but they were clearly different colors. Subaru may have varied its shade of blue, making it lighter so that the Scalextric Subaru would be painted in the correct shade, but for earlier models to this Impreza WRC and that later Subaru would have changed to a lighter blue. I don't know, but I find it very curious that Zero Paints, who care a lot about the color tones being exact to the real car, has two shade of blue for Subaru with the same reference. If anyone knows anything about this I would appreciate the clarification. The fact is that it had a very similar shade of blue to the bodywork so I painted the interior that blue, with three coats both the tray and the anti-roll bars looked very good.
The rest of the work was limited to painting the dashboard and the front hood area in matte black (Humbrol nº.33 enamel), the bottom of the headlights and the transmission tunnel with silver paint, and the seat belts made with surgical tape painted with Vallejo acrylic blue. Everything placed in its place looked like this:
In the previous image it is not well visible, but in the area of the hood, where the engine cooling opening and the air inlet are, I glued a fabric tape that is used to put the ropes on the roller blinds. I don't know what material it is made of exactly, but it was very well adhered to the surface with Tamiya model glue, it is thin and very resistant, it can be painted easily with enamels and, above all, the result is very real, which is why I use it very often to simulate grids.
Finally, it was necessary to detail the body a little bit. In this case they would be minimal details, the main one being painting the background of the car's rear lights, which on the original car looked like this:
And with a little bit of Vallejo silver acrylic paint they looked like this:
And detail the anti-heat protection for the rear bumper exhaust pipe. In this case, I glued a small piece of aluminum adhesive tape like that used to seal chimneys and smoke extraction pipes. It is an adhesive aluminum tape that is sold in hardware and industrial supplies stores and that adheres and fits very well to the surface. I glued the piece in the right place and adjusted it by rubbing it with a cotton swab until it was a smooth surface. Then I cut the rest with a very sharp cutter and removed it from the bodywork, achieving this result.
As you can see, it looks very real, and since it is adhesive, it can be removed at any time if we want to do it. And with this last detail and some antennas on the roof, the car was finished, all that was left was to assemble it to achieve this result:
As I have said other times, you don't have to complicate things to do good work. A little bit of paint here, a little detail there, a better decorated interior that enhances any car and matching wheels turn a somewhat bland car into a much more beautiful one. It is a simple job that is very enjoyable and that I really like doing, because not everything is going to be long and complex modifications and decorations.
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