Pikes Peak

That is Ari Vatanen in 1988, driving a Peugeot 405 T16. It took him 10:47.220 to run the more than 156 turns in 19.99 km and climbing 4720 ft of the Pikes Peak Highway in Colorado, USA.

Last Saturday 24th, Romain Dumas aboard the Volkswagen I.D. R (electric car) did the same run in just 7:57.148. Time passes and we get faster.

Decal afternoon

Unfortunately sometimes model manufacturers don’t apply all the brands and markings that a car should have. Usually it’s due to licensing issues, so that’s not something rare to happen among budget brands. But sometimes the manufacturer just wants to be politically correct, and with that many race cars with tobacco brands are produced with missing logos. For the same reason, it’s almost unheard of a Nazi-era German car coming out with the correct swastikas. Some manufacturers, like Spark, add the decals loose inside the package so that the owner can apply them or not (HPI also did that, but you had to purchase the decals separately). But the majority doesn’t do that, so either you forget about it or you have the right decals made 🙁

And that’s what I did this afternoon. My Porsche “Hippie”917LH, from CMR, came without the appropriate Martini logos, and my Mercedes-Benz W125 Stromlinie from Minichamps (future review) came without the correct swastikas.  The Mercedes was a piece of cake to do, and the result was perfect, but the Porsche…Still, it looks better now, so in the end it was worth the hassle.

The studio

One of the BIG pluses about 1:43 is that they’re very easy to shoot. I do it in my veranda, where I get a lot of natural light. Than it’s just a matter of setting the backdrop, putting the camera (old Nikon D90) on a tripod, setting for aperture mode and using a remote trigger.

The end results are pretty good IMO, or at least good enough to show a car. I obviously could get better results using a light box, but that would compromise the use of dioramas and backdrops.

And changing pavement and backdrops is a great way to keep the shots interesting. AND for very cheap. So for a totally unprofessional setup I think it works just fine for me .