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The glory that is the El Segundo Coupé

Since 1968 Hot Wheels' bread and butter has been muscle cars, both real-world models and fantasy cars. The brand has generally stayed in its lane when making chimeras and made muscle cars like the Boulevard Bruiser or the recent Ravenger S/T, but the El Segundo Coupé is a notable break from this.

The El Segundo Coupé originated under a different name as a somewhat experimental 2022 casting by Sonny Fisher - the Coupé Clip, a wheelless, nearly bare zamac keyring, the concept of which was later developed into a licenced Porsche 911 version that became the weirdest instance of scalping I've yet seen.  Conceptually it was interesting and clearly popular, but I always felt it should have been a special separate series with iconic Hot Wheels designs and real world cars made the same way, without it eating into the main line numbers (and hopefully stealing the market for those fuckers on Etsy that take mainlines, drill a hole in the back, screw an eyelet and key chain in, then sell them for eight times the price, and are often the only result when you try to find a super popular model because shockingly nobody actually wants them as keyrings - I'm convinced that 100% of their business is well-meaning but clueless people buying them as gifts).  I never got one, my pockets are heavy enough without lumps of solid metal adding to it, but I did always like how the Coupé Clip's lines flowed.

My first thought on seeing the 2023 debut of this fully realised design, also by Sonny Fisher, was that it resembles a European sports racer of the '60s derived from a sleek but powerful front-engined, Kammbacked grand tourer with a coachbuilt body in the Italian or English tradition.  Actually, that's not true - that was my second thought, the first being "Wow, that's gorgeous! I must have it".  I never saw the first release in shops and had to pay the ransom to some ebay terrorist to get hold of it, something I've never seen happen with a fantasy car before.  Naturally I had to give it some better wheels; lace wheels fit the design well, but black lace wheels never make sense; they are supposed to evoke wire wheels, but those are rarely ever black. The plain silver with empty white roundels really sells the sports racer vibe while serving serious understated elegance.  The inside has no easter eggs, not even a spare wheel, only a basic pair of seats.

The second colour, black and gold, was a lot better on paper than in reality, in my view, so I skipped it, although I think it might be significantly improved by removal of the tampos.  The 2024 version was a big improvement, bringing a great old-style racing livery on possibly my favourite paint colour that Hot Wheels make, metallic teal.  Again, not thrilled by the wheel choice, in that case a set of chrome PR5 wheels which weren't bad but weren't inspired either, but that's a simple fix - swapped for chrome lace wheels this looks fabulous.  But like the Amaru GTC we discussed recently, the second colour was a bafflingly close colour to the first, a pleasant yet not quite as nice royal blue metallic on an inexplicable and unsuitable white base, so again I gave it a miss; I saw a de-tampoed one on ebay that looked way better so maybe I'll change my mind if the chance comes around.  Interestingly these seemed much more common in shops.

This year's two El Segundo Coupé releases have both been in five-packs.  I refuse to buy those unless I really want everything in them, so I am once again limited to ebay extortionists, and while I have yet to find the red Mattel 80th Anniversary one on offer singly anywhere, I was able to find the one from the Retro Racers pack for a decent price sold by someone I was already buying from to expand my (mostly) Matchbox Jurassic Park collection, so that wasn't especially extortionate.  This one is a pretty close metalflake paint equivalent to the Amaru GTC's moulded plastic amber colour, and its livery (notably only printed on 2 faces of the car - Mattel are out-cheaping even themselves), has a more modern feel than the teal one, and the black MC5 wheels with red chrome rims are, now I've silvered the spokes, not going to need swapping out.  My trusty racing sponsor sticker sheets came to the rescue to rectify the naked bonnet.

One of the things that most impresses me about this design is that it could genuinely be a real car made almost any time in the last 65 years.  The flare of the wheel arches, the vents at the foot of the windscreen and on the C pillars bring little design touches that could be retro styling in the present day or could be the first appearance of such details in the decade that was really the beginning of modern car styling. Let's explore some of the influences that contributed to the design of the car using other Hot Wheels cars from my collection.

In considering the influences that make up the El Segundo Coupé, to me the clearest is the Ferrari 250 GTO.  That has long been a car I've absolutely loved, and its genes are evident in the overall silhouette, the blobby lights, that characteristic hip hump for the rear wheels, the small yet aggressive lip spoiler, the indented vents behind the rear wheels.  Yet several trademark elements of the 250 GTO are missing: no cutout nose intakes, no bonnet hump, no oval mouth, notably different side vents and nose contours.  This is not a 250 GTO pastiche.

There's another famously beautiful Italian car this resembles quite closely, though: the Lamborghini Miura.  The silhouette is closer at the front, with the more sloped windscreen, the exhaust setup, the rounded nose, oval lights (sort of - the lights are round but the famous 'eyelash' housings make them look oval) and rectangular grille fit better, the rear window is narrower than either the GTO or the Miura but the louvres are shared with the Miura, and while the contours of the bonnet and geometry of the vents are different, the Miura's is closer than the 250 GTO's.  But the El Segundo's a narrower, less rear-biased form, the side vents on the Miura are all behind the doors, the side windows are significantly out of step and the slightly domed roof is unlike the Miura's gentle rearward roof slope.

The third contender is a direct competitor of the 250 GTO: the Shelby Cobra Daytona - and while most would call that an American car, the base AC Cobra beneath is, after all, a British design.  The Cobra Daytona shares a longer, narrower rear window with a spare wheel beneath (hard to see on the El Segundo but it's there), front quarter side intakes, blobby lights and bumper mounted round auxiliaries and bonnet intakes, but has side exhausts, a taller and narrower grille and a longer rear that tapers inward more to an oval-section Kammback.

While there are also Jaguar E-type, Alfa Romeo TZ and maybe some Aston Martin comparisons to make, all those are 1960s cars.  But the El Segundo's brilliance is in its simultaneous vintage look and modernity.  While it resembles a Corvette somewhat, the Callaway C7 is a completely original Callaway design that the El Segundo also brings to mind, and despite the more '90s design the super-shallow windscreen is a close match, as are the lights and the chin spoiler.  And while we're Corvette-adjacent, There' maybe some C2 genes in there, and the bulged, creased-ridge front wheelarches also recall the C3 to some extent, although not many other details of the car do.

There's also Lamborghini's 2006 concept reinterpretation of the Miura to take into account; sadly, I don't believe a diecast version of this actually exists so we'll have to use photos of the real car, but since it's close to the '66 Miura many of the same points apply.  This was a stunning shot at a new styling direction for Lamborghini prior to the polygonal 'stealth plane' design language they currently use, but it ultimately never went anywhere.  But it was widely loved and it does have some real relevance to the El Segundo Coupé, I think.  The chin spoiler is a different shape but similar idea, the lights are closer to El Segundo than the original '66 Miura too.  My feeling is that in the execution this is further from the El Segundo Coupé than the original but in concept it's right alongside.

And in the same vein, the sublime Ford Shelby GR-1 concept from 2005, another car I learned about purely from discovering and becoming quickly enamoured of the diecast, is similarly appropriate, even if a lot of details differ.  Like most Ford sports concepts, this car is fascinating; a fantastic chimera of a Shelby Daytona and a Ford GT40 all by itself and, really, could be the subject of a whole similar analysis…  But staying on topic, particularly notable here are the side vents with their diagonal contour and the distinctive notched rear window, but the smooth curves of the wheel arch flares are also similar and uncharacteristic of '60s cars.

There are probably more cars that have contributed to the El Segundo Coupé that I don't know about - my knowledge of Maseratis of the '60s and front-engined modern Ferraris is pretty bad, not to mention more small-volume cars.  Ultimately, though, the car has a complex character of its own simply by being in such detailed conversation with iconic cars like these, and I'm very glad Hot Wheels designers like Sonny Fisher have become able to step beyond the muscle car chimeras the brand perfected decades ago.  I feel this car has the potential to become the new Twin Mill/Bone Shaker/Deora II, a new icon of Hot Wheels, if they keep it coming - its inclusion in the 80th anniversary 5-pack is a promising start, and a purple/white colour-changer is also coming, it seems.

Another great chimera was newly released this year that shows a similar level of both broad and deep design mastery, but as a chimera based on '90s Japanese sports cars it heads in another new and cool direction. I'm looking forward to seeing new versions of the Hako Type D by Bryan Zhao, and I'll wait for some varied releases before I fully analyse that one.  However I was also very excited to hear there's a new evolution of the El Segundo Coupé coming out soon: the El Segundo Rallye, implying a mashup of two of my favourite kinds of cars, Italian sports racers and rally cars.  I'll be snagging that as soon as I possibly can.

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Fantasy car taxonomy, with a cute cat, a medical pig and a mythical beast or two

Recently I've got my hands on some great new fantasy vehicles, and today I want to discuss a new classification system I've recently adopted for fantasy castings.

Any collector must also be an organiser of the collection they build, and as I struggled to make more sense of my fantasy models I realised that it's universally true that the fantasy cars diecast makers put out can be categorised into three or maybe five groups: originals, pastiche and chimera are the major categories, but originals can be subdivided further with two particular subgroups, namely character cars and self-references.  Originals could be carved up further on the grounds of realism, theme or many other criteria, but since my main focus is design I'll not be especially pernickety there.

Here's a straight-up original that's more toward the realistic end, the Amaru GTC by Charlie Angulo, a new plastic-body-on-metal-base design for 2025 which also debuts the ID wheel design in the main line where previously they only appeared on the now-cancelled Hot Wheels ID series.  This car is one of those with annoyingly similar colour variations.  The very first one was orange, and this second colour variant is amber, right on the border of orange and yellow.  I never saw the orange one, but this is a nice colour, preferable to orange in my book.  This is a fully unreal design not intended to resemble any real car; the concept is very similar to something like the Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, a supercar for off-road, but the execution goes a very different direction, with a taller stance, dual spares at the back and these wing-like aerofoils that almost but not quite meet fins emerging from the body.  The aerofoils, rather snake-like front end and the name refer to Amaru, a winged chimeric creature of Quechua and Inca mythology (and, by a roundabout route, Tupac Shakur's middle name).  You'll never see anything like this design anywhere other than in Hot Wheels, though, that's the key takeaway from this.

By contrast, I also got this, Feline Lucky, a design by Bryan Zhao also debuting this year.  I highly doubt you could characterise this as realistic by anyone's standards.  This is from a broad type of Hot Wheels mainline you could call 'thing-as-car', and depicts a Manekineko (招き猫), a 'beckoning cat' common in Japanese and some Chinese homes and shops as lucky charms.  They are depicted backoning in the Japanese fashion, palm down, as if scraping something on a surface toward you, rather than palm up as is common in the west - this, somewhat ironically, is seen as the way you gesture to animals and therefore disrespectful in Japanese culture, and is often genuinely not recognised as beckoning by Japanese people. These figurines have been around for about 200 years and appear in an early form in ukiyo-e by Hiroshige from 1852, although nowadays they are often motorised and/or solar powered; they are also common in Chinese culture, where they are known as jīnmāo (招财猫), but originate in Japan.  The idea is that the cat is inviting good fortune into your life, which is why they are often seen in businesses, and different colours have different meanings.

Usually the cat has a red collar with a bell and clutches a large old-style oval gold coin to its chest with its non-waving paw while beckoning with its other.  This cat-car has a turbo in place of the coin, and sits against a V8 - no seats or drivers here.  The right arm is articulated and the wave is actuated by a spur on the inside of the wheel, a mechanism I've seen on Matchbox Rollamatics from the late '70s.  The pads of the cat's paws act as headlights and at the back in place of a number plate it says "招き猫".  It's from the Celebration Racers line and a little icon on the card refers to the 29th of September, which is officially Manekineko day in Japan, although I never saw anyone celebrate this - but it's a great excuse to make a really fun thing-as-car.  While I have a couple, thing-as car castings are not usually my thing, but this was an instant buy for me, a cat-lover and former Japanese resident, and it seems to have had some short term effect, as the next Hot Wheels display I checked had a  Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Competizione, the only new Hot Wheels Ferrari so far I care about!  While it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Amaru GTC, it's still of a type in that it's an entirely original design, not intended to resemble another vehicle.

The character cars are a similar deal, in a way.  This isn't an especially appealing idea to me so I only have one of these, War Machine, a car-ified version of the Marvel character as seen in the MCU series designed by Tyler Charest in 2019.  Japanese Mercari was a fabulous resource for a diecast enthusiast finding their identity as a collector, as there were often quite valuable models being sold by people offloading their old unwanted toys for literally the lowest possible price Mercari allows sellers to charge, and they have a deal with Japan Post, so I got this for ￥300 delivered.  For a designer these represent an interesting challenge: reinterpret an existing character design as a car in such a way that they are workable as a car but also recognisable as that character.  The character focus is the priority so they rarely resemble any specific car, but generic car design ideas work fine.  This car is immediately identifiable as a sci-fi 4x4 armoured vehicle even as it immediately evokes War Machine as a character.  Hot Wheels are not the only company that does this, Tomica also make their own line of character cars called Dream Tomica. They are mostly based on kids IP, but after the Star Wars boom following Ep.VII, I was pretty tempted to get a Luke Skywalker car that reimagined his orange X-wing pilot outfit as a muscle car.  Thanks to an apposite Star Wars quote I decided not to, identifying one of those collecting branch points any collector hits from time to time: "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny"

The other subcategory of original designs is the self-reference.  Diecast cars have been around for a long time and as is inevitable in the hyper-capitalist hellscape we must now all endure, all nostalgia must and will be monetised.  Given Hot Wheels' prominence in the market, most of this revolves around classic Hot Wheels models such as Twin Mill, Bone Shaker, Deora, that kind of stuff, all of which get both reissued as-is and iterated on with things like the Super Twin Mill, Cone Shaker or Twin Dorado in just the last year or so.  As a Matchbox kid with no nostalgic connection to those, these fail to appeal to me.  Recently, however, Mattel have slightly branched into nostalgic models that reference matchbox models, like this, the Rapid Pulse, a fantasy ambulance designed by Eric Han.  The transparent canopy over the middle seems a clear callback to a classic Matchbox fantasy ambulance called Stretcha Fetcha. 

This always looked oddly like those 19th century paintings of prize pigs and didn't really appeal to me, but I do like the Rapid Pulse, it loses the pig aspect and gains a Dodge van-esque aura.   The detail is great, unusually it has a driver as well as a patient, still holding a steering wheel, as well as gas bottles and unidentified medical equipment sharing space with what seems to be the engine; although one slight drawback is that the thing doesn't seem to have any doors, or come to that any privacy for the patient.  I don't think you can plausibly claim this isn't inspired by the Stretcha Fetcha.

The second major type of original diecast model is the Pastiche.  These are usually made when a company can't get the rights to manufacture a specific car, so instead they make a car which really looks like it in all but the smallest details. There could be a lot of reasons for this, for example the manufacturers of the car just don't want to work with diecast makers, or maybe the car has some kind of obstacle to being licenced or there's an exclusivity deal going on, or something like that. A fantastic example of this is this 2003 debut version of the Vairy 8, a design by Mark Jones which is a pastiche of a competition-modified Chevrolet Corvair.  The Corvair, of course was a revolutionary at the time rear-engined car which had a terrible reputation kind of thrust upon it, arguably undeservedly; Ralph Nader was instrumental in getting the car pulled from sale after he wrote a book called "Unsafe at Any Speed", which was a takedown of the car's safety record. This model references that - you can see 'Ralph's ride' written on the side. Hot Wheels later made a Corvair which you can see here; this is from the Jay Leno's Garage series, and was the least popular of all the cars in that series and therefore very easy to buy, I remember. This is a fully licenced version of the Corvair, but the pastiche looks remarkably close, especially if you kind of mentally edit out the modifications which are the main differentiating factor.  Other examples are things like the Super Tsunami, a customised Toyota Supra A80 pastiche with a few first-gen Mitsubishi Eclipse touches sculpted by Phil Riehlman from 2002, probably made to piggyback on the first Fast and Furious film, featuring triangular bonnet cutouts very similar to the TRD bonnet from the film, or the ever-lovely Mighty K, which is millimetres from being a customised Daihatsu Hijet.  These aim to capture the lines and the vibes of a specific car without being identical, demanding a designer modulate their creativity just right: not too creative, not too similar.

Which finally brings us to the third and in my view most interesting category, the chimera.  Just as this mythic beast (and the Amaru of myth also) is composed of features taken from several creatures, cars in this group are a mix of features from a number of different real models.  This, in my estimation is the most challenging kind of design to land, requiring both a deep understanding of the design characteristics of the type you're creating and a broad knowledge of how they are implemented in real designs.  The payoff is that, when well executed, a chimera can be both evocative and original in a way that directly echoes design of real cars, for instance the many Japanese cars that are designed to resemble a European or American car, like the ST205 Toyota Celica and the Alpine A110, or the Mazda RX7 FC and the Porsche 944 - both are good looking cars that fit with the design language of their brands, but the resemblance is clear and it's clearly a tribute rather than a rip-off.  A good chimera design can easily be mistaken for a real car in a way that Originals are unlikely to be and pastiche designs probably wouldn't unless you're not much of a car person.

The Hot Wheels version of this usually involves multiple cars, and can be seen in Larry Wood's Blvd. Bruiser, this one from 2011.  Personally I see Shelby Mustang in the overall silhouette and rear window, Camaro in the back end, C3 Corvette in the crested front wheel arches, Riviera in the nose contours and front bumper and Challenger in the C pillar vents, alongside generic custom touches like the side exhausts and bonnet vent, but the crucial factor that makes it work is the balance of all these design touches to ensure that none of those is too dominant.  When you think about the skills needed to put this together you can understand why Larry Wood is so beloved.  Hot Wheels are probably the most prolific makers of these but by no means the only ones - Matchbox are particularly good at 4x4 chimeras, and Tomica and even Siku make these sorts of cars now and then too.  If you have any interest in car design, this type of fantasy car is the greatest kind of testament to the skill of car design, and one of the greatest ways to build your understanding of car design at the same time.

Tomorrow we'll explore one of the best chimeras Hot Wheels have ever made...

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Background focus: the strange case of the diecast shitbox

Today I want to probe a mysterious subgenre of diecast hiding in plain sight in catalogues for many years: the shitbox.

The selection of models a diecast maker produces is a fascinating vertical slice of car culture.  You've got the obvious ones: the world's coolest, most desirable cars, the Ferraris, the Bentleys, the Mustangs, the Porsches, the elaborate customs - all the cars that have clear, easily identified appeal through speed, power, design, status, cost, exoticness; the cars we have the urge to photograph on the street when we see them.  This is the essence of what Hot Wheels is about.  Allied to this but a little separate are the vintage and classic models which have some of those previous qualities, but add a nostalgic twist to things, a somewhat acquired taste, including 'cult' vehicles - relatively ordinary but iconic cars that transcend their era and context, like Beetles, Jeeps, London Taxis and the like.  Then there are the 'wallpaper' cars, the cars and commercial vehicles we see on the road every day, the cars most people own, and you can't overestimate the appeal of having a model of your family car, or the van or truck your family member drives for work, or maybe the car your parent used to have, if you add that nostalgia factor back in.  Tomica built their brand on this, Matchbox too.  Then of course there's the movie and motorsport models, cars that we know and love from screens and tracks.

But there's another category.  There are some models that aren't necessarily all that common on the road, that aren't particularly cool or desirable or prestigious, that don't really have many associations with anything in particular.  They're just… there, the traffic cars that named characters dodge around in a chase scene.  Nondescript vehicles that when you imagine them, if you even remember they exist, are always a bit shabby and past their best.

In a word, shitboxes. 

Not that they are particularly bad cars, mind you, they are simply not what most people would in any way call desirable.

Here's an example: This 1982 Dodge Aries estate, sculpted by Larry Wood for Hot Wheels.  This was not made by Hot Wheels for long ('82-'84) and appeared only in yellow with wood siding decals. I had one as a kid, but I don't remember getting it, just having it; I suspect it may have been given to my family.  My mum told me as a little kid my favourite colour was yellow, but I can't remember ever feeling anything other than mild irritation at yellow - to me my favourite colour has always been green, but if my mum was right, that's about the only reason why I can imagine wanting this car. Otherwise I have no idea why I had it, a faint enigma that made me perversely fond of it and which made me seek it out again as a grown up collector rebuilding a replica of my childhood collection.

Perhaps more to the point, I don't immediately see why Hot Wheels made it in the first place.  From what I read, the K-chassis that this is based on was phenomenally adaptable for different kinds of vehicles and as a result decent sales saved the Chrysler group from going under.  That gives it historic importance, but when it was new nobody knew if it'd be big.  It's a North American car, not the kind of thing seen in other markets, so selling it globally seems a strange move for Hot Wheels.

Another example is this Peugeot 505, also a Larry Wood sculpted 1982 Hot Wheels debut, though the car first appeared in 1979.  This one lasted until 1985 in Hot Wheels lineup, and was released in three colours, gold, brown and this blue, its debut colour.  The car itself was built in several plants and sold globally, and was among the last Peugeot cars sold in the USA before they left the market in 1991, a fact that gives the car a faintly doomed feel. However this is not a US version, which can be seen from the headlights - this was still the era of the federally-mandated sealed beam light and US model 505s had mountings for dual round lights rather than these somewhat annoyed-looking oblongs.  I never had one of these as a kid but I feel my collection lacks in French cars, and it's quite handsome, so this was an easy yes when I saw it.

Example number three is a Toyota Tercel 4WD estate, also called a Toyota Sprinter Carib in Japan, but labelled just Toyota 4WD by Majorette, another from my childhood collection.  It's a 1:55 model, so appears beefier than it should next to the others.  This car was not at all common in the UK, but during my 1989 holiday in Iceland I really noticed them as they were among the most common cars on the road there - the robust 4WD system being a real selling point in a country where asphalt is a luxury and winter is a bitch.  Majorette, the most commonly-encountered diecast brand in Iceland by my reckoning, made this model from 1985 to 1990, in many nice colours and also this eye-buggering Dyno Rod dayglo orange, a 1989-1990 colour from the days when such paint colours had novelty on their side and as such many things for kids were suddenly offensively bright.

All those are relatively ancient models, but I don't wish to give the impression that the shitbox diecast was a phenomenon that only happened in the 80s, there are current instances of this kind of non-entity Car being produced. For example this 2023 Alfa Romeo Tonale (not toenail! The E is, I think, pronounced, such that it should have the same stress and rhyme with 'Pasquale'), from the 2024 Matchbox range. I bought this basically because of the beautiful, eye-catching green metalflake paint, which I just couldn't ignore, even though I kind of low-key detest the car itself. The Toenail, a version of which, with a different bumper, is sold as the Dodge Hornet in the US, is another of these car-based crossover SUV things that isn't really very good at anything except appealing to people who don't really like cars but need one and would prefer to be comfy.  In a decade or so when petrol engines are finally on the way out, electric car infrastructure is a bit more practicable and even the stupidest people will finally be conceding that it's time to switch to electric, these sorts of cars will be completely unwanted but distressingly common.  The shitbox of the future; perhaps a pre-shitbox?

Here's another, with a twist - the Volvo XC40 Recharge sculpted by Sonny Fisher for Hot Wheels 2023 line-up, an electric version of a competitor to the Tonale built on a Geely platform developed in Sweden.  But here the magic of Hot Wheels kicks in; rather than a straight model of the car like the Matchbox Tonale, Fisher reworked the base vehicle into a big-wheeled, tough off-roader fit for rock-crawling and outfitted with wide wheel arches, a roof rack with snowboards and a jack (love a roof rack with stuff on it, such a characterful detail that really supports customisation!), lights, a bullbar, running boards - all the sort of stuff you see on absurd American pickups and Jeeps people usually do all that stuff with.  It takes a contemporary pre-shitbox and makes it cool as hell and highly characterful, and I love it.  Things like this inspire the customiser in me, and makes me want to do things like this to the likes of all the others in this post.  Alas, I no longer have the dexterity, the disposable income or the access to spray paint that I did.

Finally, here's a classic shitbox, the 1985 Proton Saga. On paper, this might seem to belong with the Dodge and Peugeot at the beginning, but this was sculpted by Fraser Campbell for Hot Wheels in 2024 (not these wheels, though - they're my addition!).  As soon as I saw this on the lists of upcoming cars I knew I'd  have to have it.  In 1991 (I think), my good schoolfriend Marcus's dad bought a Proton Saga new, one of the first to be sold in the UK, and several times gave me a ride home in it; he was immensely proud of it and clearly considered its Malaysian origins exotic, and I humoured him for the sake of politeness, but it was never what I considered very special (with good reason, it turns out it's basically an '83 Mitsubishi Lancer under its skin).  Naturally, they are completely gone from UK roads now but I had fond memories of that silly car.  In fact this was the first car Proton made, making it also the first ever Malaysian-made car, and as such it's an icon of national progress in Malaysia.  Since most mainline single Hot Wheels cars are made in Malaysia, this particular shitbox casting can be easily explained as a tribute to the country and workers Mattel work with.  There was even a Malaysia-only version with special card art drawn by a child who won a competition.

This doesn't explain the shitbox diecast phenomenon entirely, though I have a theory, drawn from the murky world of video game law.  Diecast makers who produce licenced cars, as opposed to fantasy castings, are in a way at the mercy of car manufacturers in much the same way that racing game studios are: they need these licences to sell their products a lot more than the carmakers need the advertising that licensees essentially provide (with some exceptions, mostly struggling companies like Nissan, who I suspect are happy to sell rights to anyone who will give them some cash).  That means they get to dictate terms, which is why especially in more recent racing games like Gran Turismo 7 and Forza Horizon 5 alongside racing legends and hypercars, we see uninspiring crossover SUVs that no racing game buyer would ever want to drive; if a developer goes to Peugeot and ask to put the 205 T16 and 9X8 Hypercar in their game their response is: only if you also put the 2008 in too.

My (entirely speculative and unevidenced) theory is that something like this is at times what happens with Diecasts.  Maybe Matchbox only get to make a 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA and a Giulia Quadrifoglio IF they make a Tonale and a Stelvio.  Maybe Dodge said Hot Wheels must do an Aries wagon if they wanted to make Chargers, and Volvo (or Geely, holding their leash) only let them do the 240 Drift Wagon if they made an XC40 Recharge.  It's a logical explanation for why there are these cars nobody is really dying to have a model of, but at the same time it doesn't explain everything.  The Peugeot, for example - that was the only Peugeot Hot Wheels made in 1982, or until 1989. The Majorette Toyota debuted in 1985, but Toyota only made it for three more years, and then stopped selling the Tercel in Europe altogether.

On the other hand, because licencing is for whatever reason so secretive, we have no idea if it's anything like as complicated or expensive as some make out it is for games.  It's something I'd really like to have a chance to ask an insider.  Given the significantly longer history of working together it may be relatively simple and cheap for a big diecast firm to get a model licensed (if it's not a Ferrari, that is - those Maranello prima donnas are a law unto themselves), so maybe it's just that Larry Wood had a thing for the Peugeot 505 - and if you're a car enthusiast, I'm 100% sure you too have a thing for a car nobody else gives a damn about, like me and the Nissan Cube:

Note that I haven't included any Tomicas in this (other than that blue Cube above). That's because this kind of car (or perhaps more accurately the pre-shitbox) is honestly about half of what they make. Their original mission was to make model cars like children might see around them on Japan's roads, and while they no longer have a separate series for non-Japanese cars, they have stayed mostly true to that and produce mostly currently-sold or recent cars. Because of the incredible diversity and scope of the Japanese car market, inevitably some models dwindle into obscurity. But then, I'm fairly certain the relationship between Tomica and the carmakers of Japan is unique, so I feel special circumstances apply.

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Hot Wheels vs. Labubus: perceived value, loyalty and gambling addiction, oh my!

Recently while on a YouTube binge I saw Aini, a lady who tends to make really good analysis videos, presenting the addictive culture of Labubus.  I had not heard of these things before, but damn if I didn't feel like I was watching a video about Hot Wheels.  Not many photos for today, but these two seem thematically appropriate:

Labubus are little collectible toys sold in quantity-limited, artificially scarce drops to collectors to encourage competitive consumption, and many collectors buy entire boxes at once to get all the different varieties and increase their chances of getting the super-rare secret designs, like some sort of search for hidden loot or something (there must be a phrase for this…). Collector trends are driven by posts on socials about their latest scores and showing off their collections for clout, and there's a thriving resale market, sometimes with scary markups compared to retail. If you're a Hot Wheels collector buying new in 2025 this may all seem a pretty familiar situation.

There are important differences, particularly the fact Labubus are sold in blind boxes so a full collection is much more overtly based on luck than buying Hot Wheels.  They are also far more expensive than all but the most costly RLC-exclusive Hot Wheels, and there are a lot fewer than 250 of them annually.  Also, demand for Labubus is very celebrity- and fashion-driven, trading on the images of stars accessorising their bags with them or posing with them. Still, the similarity is striking.  And have you seen the video clips Hot Wheels is putting out with those famous faces from the car journalism, racing, drifting and customising scene?

The idea of perceived value being driven by emotional (quality, design, nostalgia), social (having it is cool) and economic (resale value) factors checks out fully in the case of Hot Wheels, albeit in different ways from Labubus.  As a more commonplace toy, there's much less celeb factor here and the social aspect is much more localised to your peers and other enthusiasts on socials.  The fact Labubus are sold like luxury goods that make you work for an opportunity to buy something is a move designed to make buyers feel a brand loyalty.  Hot Wheels is of course not sold like a luxury good, but we all know how much work peghunting for that one damn car can be, and it certainly makes people loyal.

What especially grabbed my interest, though, was the step-by-step "Loyalty Pipeline" describing how Labubus are designed to create in customers a sense of loyalty necessary to build a purchase into an addiction.   It goes like this:

Cognitive Loyalty - you buy one because 'it's just neat'; breaking that down, the product's quality (both in how good it is and in what properties it possesses) strikes you and pleases you.

Affective loyalty - customers develop an emotional attachment. Good memories and positive emotions are  associated with the product.

Loyalty of action - consumers develop consistent and/or impulsive purchasing habits around releases of products, often disregarding price or need.

Commitment loyalty - at this point we see an integration of the product into a collector's identity. The product is a part of their personality and they are effectively brand ambassadors, actively promoting the products to others.

My first impulse was to push back at the order of these.  Each step in itself is a relevant insight into understanding collecting generally, but I don't think this order necessarily makes complete sense.  It's presented as a fairly logical sequence in the academic paper that Aini references and, when dealing with a new product entirely, it does follow. However, for a toy like Hot Wheels that's been around longer than most of its collectors have been alive, it's more complex.

I would hazard a guess that most adult collectors of Hot Wheels have not been collectors of Hot Wheels all their lives. For me, the pattern was of course collecting cars when I was a kid (in fact, it was Matchbox for me more than Hot Wheels), and deciding to stop as I grew up, in my case when I was 14 and my mum and I moved almost the entire length of England, and had to choose what to pack and what to get rid of - most toys didn't make that cut.   Also, at the time Matchbox were really going for neon colours that didn't sit that well with me, and car design was increasingly going all blobby and rounded, which turned me off cars generally for a long time.

As an adult coming back to it, the Lamborghini Countach I've spoken about before was the first model I bought in my adult collecting period.  I had a "Boy that's cool... Hey, why don't I just buy one?" moment. The second was this Ferrari Testarossa. It's also a Tomica Premium, and I bought it because I was getting into Synthwave, especially Outrun, a musical sub-genre which, as anyone who has explored the scene will know, holds the Testarossa pretty much sacred. I swung past the toy section in my local Ito Yokado to see if they had a Testarossa and lo and behold, there it was, same colour as Mars.  I loved it, especially beside the Countach, and it simply grew from there.

Now, I suppose you could make the argument that because Tomica was a new brand to me, first of all my cognitive loyalty was developed by impulsively buying the Countach, but on the other hand, I was interested in getting a Ferrari Testarossa, the Tomica brand didn't really matter to me, it was simply what was available, and the fact that I was looking for a diecast at all was because I already had an affective loyalty toward diecasts generally from my time as a child, buying (or more often being bought, if I'm honest, my parents were not in a hurry to make me understand managing money) Matchbox and Siku and Majorette and Corgi, and also occasionally Hot Wheels - main line Hot Wheels were not common at all in the UK in the '80s and generally inferior to Matchbox cars in terms of model selection, with all those US models I'd never seen and fantasy cars - and in terms of realism, both in casting and paint.  Mattel's later buyout of Matchbox changed that dramatically, but that was way after my childhood collecting period had ended, so I have few emotional associations with Hot Wheels from my childhood.

Loyalty of action is something that only developed for me once I discovered that 1) Amazon sold Hot Wheels and Tomicas (his may be available only on Amazon Japan, and I know is not something that's necessarily available in many countries), and allowed you to preorder them, and 2) Mercari was a great place to find second-hand bargains.  In terms of buying second-hand, you could say I was consistent around not releases but around learning of the existence of a car I wanted a model of.  I often spent entirely much too much on it, that much is true. Perhaps returning to the UK where postage is much more expensive was a good thing in the long run.

When it comes to commitment loyalty, this shows up a key problem of this analysis, in my view, as it assumes a collection is brand-based.  To me, loyalty is as much about rejection of alternatives as it is supporting your chosen one.  I know there are many people who only collect Hot Wheels or Tomica, or maybe they focus on e.g. Toyota and buy Toyota models from any diecast brand, or even both approaches, such that they only collect Hot Wheels Mustangs or somesuch.

But not me. At risk of sounding pretentious, if my collection has a focus it's my life-long fascination with car design, so my vision for the collection is a miniature museum of car design. To that end my collection encompasses 19 different diecast brands and most car brands, possibly more, because the subject of the collection - design of cars and other vehicles - is the focus, not the brand, and so the loyalty is to that subject. As such I'm not about to evangelise one brand over another, especially as I take a fairly historical overview of the hobby, with several cars in the collection being older than I am, and I know that all these brands have evolved considerably over time, sometimes for the worse.

The issues with this idea of loyalty alongside the differences between products creates issues in turn with how this analysis can be applied to diecast in terms of how it resembles gambling.  The particular comparison made is variable ratio reinforcement, the mechanic behind slot machines, which offer a reward with a randomised (or far too complex to calculate, at least) chance of winning.  The nature of this type of chance game is that the pleasure comes from anticipation, rather than winning. For Labubus, the reveal that comes with opening the packaging is the key element that is anticipated.

The Hot Wheels experience is a different one, but I'd argue the same concept applies on a different scale.  Rather than a blind box, the anticipated reveal is going into the shop to see what's there, and the gamble is less a matter of money than time and effort. But as we can see from the commonality of peghunting videos, there's still a lot of pleasure in anticipating, whether the outcome is the same handful of cars nobody wants that have been cluttering the place up for months or finding a fresh, undisturbed restock of the latest releases. I avoid addictive things on principle but I do feel a certain psychological draw to hunting for diecasts, I won't lie. Is it addiction? Maybe.

Even the language we as collectors use is pretty indicative of the importance of this part of the collecting experience; 'peghunting' is, if we're honest, a very self-aggrandising name for what basically amounts to shopping.  Hunting is not really about the meat, after all, but the skill of tracking and stalking the prey - the journey over the destination, the anticipation over the outcome.

Given the popularity of blind box toys and the degree to which Mattel are happy to both embrace FOMO-based sales strategies and to leverage brand power and social media to promote their Hot Wheels releases (when's the last time you saw any actual Hot Wheels advertising?), it's surprising to me Mattel haven't tried to snag a bigger slice of this pie. They have mystery models, of course, and colour revealers, but more blind box stuff with a more premium feel and chances of some exclusive shiny treasure hunts would be almost trivially easy for them, I would think. Hot Wheels are different sort of market, it's true, but they don't have to chase the same high price bracket, gachapon toys are massive in east Asia and also pocket-money priced after all, and Mattel do have some experience with more upmarket, high-scarcity products in the form of RLC releases, the ID series and NFT garage. One thing I don't expect from Mattel is leaving money on the table. Not that I want to encourage them, of course - shit's scarce and expensive enough.

[secretcatpolicy]

Nightburnerz, Part 2: What are Nightburnerz, exactly?

I don't usually pay attention to the 'mini collection'/segment/series/group things within the main line releases all that much, since I can't afford the money or shelf space needed to be a completist, and making a habit of buying things I don't really want just because they're in the same series (I'm sticking with this word from now on) is not only against my wider principles but is also a certain way to run out of both money and space. Usually these series are pretty self explanatory, but some are a bit esoteric, and none more so in my estimation than Nightburnerz. So I found myself wondering, what does inclusion in this series actually mean? What is the measure of a Nightburner?

Happily, I have here several of them from across the series lineage, and close analogues to others, so let's investigate this a bit and see what these have in common. The Wikia site characterises the series as featuring "brightly colored tuners" and notes "sometimes a sports car makes the cut", which seems an odd statement as most 'tuners' (I hate this word, to me it implies that tuning is necessary to make said cars competitive, when it's frequently applied to cars that are hot as hell from the factory) are already sports cars, but by any metric that seems a very loosely defined group, containing as it does about half of what HW make, if not more. Also, there are plenty of muscle cars and pony cars throughout the series, even a motorbike in 2015.

The series started, apparently, in 2010, and appeared after that in the main line in some form in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, then as five-packs in 2021, 2022, 2024 and, obviously, 2025. In 2016 the series added the capsule description "Super speeders designed for night driving", which sounds authoritative. But you know, what car is not designed for night driving?

That descriptor suggests to me two possibilities:

a series with big rally-style clusters of driving lights, which I'd be super down for - but very few releases in the 15-year history of the series have any extra lights at all; or

a series with paintwork intended for night-time, either bright for easy visibility (potentially to the point of something like the Neon Speeders silver/pseudopremium series) or dark for stealth. There are examples of both these styles among the series' history.

If we take the night paintwork idea, we can divide the Nightburnerz cars I have into two even groups: bright and dark. Here's the bright group: back row L to R: '09 BMW Z4M GT3 (2020), '15 Porsche 911 GT3 RS 991.2 (2017), '71 Nissan Skyline 'Hakosuka' GT-X (2017), '65 Nissan Fairlady 2000 (2019), front row L to R: '18 Bentley Continental GT3 (2020), '70 Chevrolet Chevelle SS racer (2017), '69 Porsche 914 Safari (2020), '88 Honda CR-X (2019)

And the dark group: '71 Nissan/Datsun Fairlady 240 ZG (2017), '96 Nissan 180 SX Type X (2018), '90 Chevrolt Impala SS (2020), '09 Nissan GT-R CBA-R35 (2010), '71 Nissan Fairlady/Datsun 240 ZG (2016; note this is a nearly identical car to the 2018 Nightburnerz release, but we'll get more into this car later), '07 Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione (2014), '73 Nissan Skyline 'Kenmeri' GT-R (2014), '17 Jaguar XE SV Project 8 (2020)

Additionally, I have several cars that were in Nightburnerz in other guises but these are not so different: '11 Subaru Impreza WRX STI (2022; Nb2013 car had a rally livery in traditional Subaru blue), '85 Honda City Turbo II (2022; Nb2019 had a blue version with a different livery), '88 Mazda RX-7 FC (2023; Nb2022 five-pack had a gloss yellow version), '15 Ford Focus RS (202; Nb2016 had a plain blue version), '20 McLaren Speedtail (2020; Nb2022 five-pack had a purple version), '89 Nissan 300ZX Z32 (20; Nb2024 five-pack had an orange version), '11 Lamborghini Aventador (2017; Nb2011 had a black Reventón, the origin of the Aventador's design language), '12 Lamborghini Sesto Elemento (2017; Nb 2015 had an acid green version).

So what can be said about all these? What do all these cars have in common? Clearly these are all performance road cars, and have relatively little in common otherwise. Many are Japanese, but not all, almost exactly half; many are visibly modified, which tallies with the 'tuner cars' description, but again, not all, and some are factory tuned racing versions of road cars which demands the definition be a bit more loose. It's interesting when looking at lists of the older castings to note how many fantasy castings were in the series at first, but the number tailed off over time. The 2025 Dimachinni Veloce is a bit of a departure as previous fantasy castings in this series are largely not gestalt fantasy cars that pull ideas from multiple different cars but rather fantasy cars that resemble specific real cars like the Super Tsunami (Supra A80), Asphalt Assault (Integra) and 24/7 (RX-7FD).

To me, they resemble nothing as a group quite so much as the car roster in a Need For Speed game (and I've replicated three of them in game before…). In fact, the blue 2016 240ZG was one of a few cars made as a tie-in with Need For Speed 2015, and an identical car was available in-game. It's based closely on the Nissan Fairlady Z owned by Jun Imai, a former Hot Wheels designer and founder of scale model/nebulous cool stuff brand Kaido House, who work as essentially a sub-brand of Mini GT. Note the Kaido House decals. This same car was then used as a base for the less faithful (and less licenced) copy that appeared in the Nightburnerz series in 2018, sans Kaido House decals but with a 'Neo Kaido' decal instead. It's a different casting too - note wing mirrors and different wide wheel arch contours. That one is named as a Datsun 240Z, the international version, whereas the Kaido House version is named as the JDM Nissan Fairlady Z. In both cases these are ZG cars, fitted with the aerodynamic long 'G' nose.

[linguistics/sociology intermission]

Kaidō (街道 , the ō, and any other vowel with a macron, is a long vowel sound)is a Japanese word for road, especially a highway in its original meaning of 'main travel route between places' and can be found describing ancient roads in Japan dating back hundreds of years (I used to cycle home along part of the Hokkoku Kaidō route from Takasaki to Nagano, nowadays served by National Route 18), but it may be familiar to Japanese car enthusiasts in the phrase 'kaidō racer' (街道レーサー), referring to a broad style of street racing-inspired customising from the '70s and '80s; shakotan (シャコタン or 車高短, lowered cars) and grachan (グラチャン, from the Fuji Speedway GRAnd CHAMpionship, a silhouette racer series that inspired a style) are sub-categories. When new, these were kind of troublemaker's cars, hence another word that often gets used in connection with these styles: 'yankii' (ヤンキー). This is peripherally related to the English demonym 'Yankee' meaning American, and comes from 1) the bad behaviour of US troops stationed in Japan after the war and 2) the popularity of US culture and the associated emphasis on freedom as a core cultural value (i.e. freedom from cultural norms, as opposed to the traditional core cultural value in Japanese culture, harmony) among Japanese delinquents in the '70s.

Sometimes you hear the word 'bōsōzoku' (暴走族) applied to this broad style of car, especially the more extreme ones, but this is kind of a translation error: that's a word for a person, literally translated as 'violent running tribe', an aggressive and delinquent gang member (or the gang as a whole), who might drive such a car (but most often rides a motorbike), not the car itself. That said, Japanese sometimes use this word, but it's not very flattering so maybe avoid it when talking to Japanese people.

My awesome former colleague and Jeep fan Saria taught me a really good word for such cars: 'yan-sha' (ヤン車) - literally 'yankii car'. This Hakosuka GT-X, with awesome Goodyear wheels swapped on, not in this case by me, is a great example of a classic Kaido racer yan-sha, a car built just to make trouble. The real car that this is based on was built and liveried based on cars of the period.

[Linguistics/sociology intermission ends]

I think all this gives us a really good clue to how these cars are "designed for night driving":

they are likely to be driven at night - in street races.

A lot of car culture comes from street racing, especially the Japanese scene, but naturally Mattel can't be seen to endorse illegal and dangerous street racing openly in cars designed, at face value, for children. So instead, they invented a euphemism for it: Nightburnerz. They frequently coin euphemisms for street racing, often quite evocative ones, in their premium series (Ronin Run, Mountain Drifters, Canyon Warriors, Autostrasse and so on) but this is the original HW 'plausible deniability not-street racers' series.

Maybe this is all obvious to everyone else, but to me it's an interesting discovery, and intriguing to see where Mattel decided to really start focusing on real-life car culture in Hot Wheels, a bit prior to and then parallel to the Car Culture premiums that started in 2016.

[secretcatpolicy]

Nightburnerz, Part 1: 2025's greatest HW five-pack

The 2025 selection of five-packs has been pretty dominated by the F1s, but early in the year I heard a lot about this set:

The Nightburnerz set comprises 4 licenced and one fantasy car, and where (if you're like me) most five-packs contain one or two cars you'd probably get if they were by themselves, but you don't want to pay for the others to get them, in this case every one of these is great.  I still had a little pause - but then I saw that 5-packs were reduced to £7.20!  Given they usually go for £11 and a mainline for £2.40, that's a pretty damn good price. I was never going to get the F1 set, I'm not a fan, and the Mattel anniversary one is not for me either, so this is the one for me. It's only my second five-pack ever, and with the single cars I got at the same time, it pushes my collection over the 1000 car mark! 1007 cars by my tally, and still going...

Going in order from top to bottom of the pack, first is the Sierra.  The casting, a Ryu Asada design, represents itself on the bottom as an "'87 Ford Sierra Cosworth", which is part but not all of the story - It should read Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth.  Also, the year 1987, lower ducktail spoiler below the whale-tail and central indent to the front bumper for an extra inlet slot below the grille indicates that this is the RS500 version, a limited edition of 500 RHD cars constructed for Ford and Cosworth by Aston Martin and sold in the UK only.  The Sierra was Euro Ford's main large saloon car, its hot boi configuration was known as the XR4i (alongside the Escort XR3i and Fiesta XR2i); the RS Cosworth was a hotter version with a 2.0l turbo engine based on a Ford Pinto, and the RS500 an even hotter one, with numerous engine tweaks to make it raceable.  Americans might have occasionally seen the Merkur XR4Ti on their roads and racetracks a bit earlier in the decade, a relatively unsuccessful and unusual attempt to sell a Euro Ford in the USA by beefing up and for some reason rebranding the Sierra XR4i ('Merkur' is German for Mercury), and the RS Cosworth adopted many of the components developed for the XR4Ti as well.

The RS500 was created for dominating Group A racing, which it succeeded at in touring car racing all over the world, although it was less good at rally, inevitably losing out to 4WD cars on loose surfaces; there was an XR4x4 but it did not use the powerful Cosworth engine.  This one has Advan-style gradient stripes (my favourite flavour of racing decoration) of Ford-badge blue that look amazing, and the white Aerodisc wheels are a grand choice.

I have the first release of this car (debut releases are one of my focuses with collecting, since I think of my collection as being focused on design and each car as a piece of commercial art more than a toy, and the first release most reflects the original designers' visions for the car), which is a nice pastiche of a Texaco livery worn by a successful 1987 racer - and the Matchbox Superkings one I had as a kid - and skipped the rest of the releases. They were cool, but not that cool.  I missed the white premium version with restrained and tasteful Ford racing stripes that was in the Canyon Warriors series.  That was very cool looking and if I'd seen that at a sensible price I'd have snapped it up, but in all honesty this might be even better.

Next is the Maxima.  This is a Nissan Maxima G910 estate from around 1983, modified for drifting with the rear bumper deleted, a window cut in the bonnet and a big, aggressive splitter.  It's a really great casting that injects a ton of personality into an otherwise mundane everyday vehicle, like a budget DIY response to an Audi RS2 Avant, all early '80s angles and flat body panels with lovely bolt-on box flaring.

It's a car for real car people, who understand every car is special to its owner and holds the potential for greatness within itself, that projects like this are about perceiving that potential and actualising it; the kind of car that makes you wish HW would do something like this this with your old family car, or an old beater you have long parted ways with.  I found a Speedhunters article here featuring a similar but less drifty car, with an RB25 engine swapped in, but I don't think there's an exact real-world counterpart to this car.  A weird thing I just realised about this car, though: what's going on with the back doors?  Has the rear box flare really sealed them shut?

For customisers it's a fun car to work on with the transparent bonnet allowing for engine detailing you'd not normally get a chance to appreciate, and this one has a chromed interior piece that will enhance the look of the engine a lot (I've not opened this yet, but I probably will).  I have the first release of this car also; in fact I have two of them, because this car saw the debut of the awesome FC3 wheel, modelled after the Advan SA3R wheel, one of my favourite wheel designs (and featuring on the Gentileschi Delta in Deliverance Book 3 ).  I wanted a set for customs, so I bought it again; the later releases featured a shakotan-style livery that didn’t appeal to me, and while the one in the Greddy diorama was the highlight of the set in my view, I wasn't really into the rest, so this grey/blue metallic one with "Hotto Hoiiru" on the side in Japanese is my third, but only the second design.

Next is the car that provides the artwork for the box, the Supra.  This is a car with too many names: a 2020 Toyota GR Supra A90 (a.k.a. J29/DB, a.k.a. 5th generation) that wears a Pandem (a.k.a. Rocket Bunny) version 1 body kit. There's no mention of this kit on the car itself, but the kit is easily recognisable, flaring its wheel arches out even wider than normal and adding a wide wing to the back. Compared to the standard body version, this car has been released many times.  This Ryu Asada-designed casting is one I don't have the debut version of, as I found it rather dull, but I got the one from the Slide Street premium series which had more personality, and later on a whim I got the red A80 and A90 Then and Now pair from 2022. 

The contours are very appealing on this car, especially the broad hips at the rear, and I've always admired how the car evokes the 2000GT as well as the A80 Supra, even though I don't really feel that passionate about this car.  This version is a really lustrous, sensual metalflake red that has a little iridescence to it, changing shade with angle, and suits a curvy body like this perfectly.  Some black swooshes on the sides get a Supra logotype in that strange ugly Supra font that looks like a very old man's handwriting and GR badges (the decisions behind Toyota's branding are a total mystery to me, what was wrong with TRD?). A tan interior peeps from inside. This is almost a sexy car, and I don't often say that, I don't find cars and sex crossing over very naturally, but this and its flowing curves is the colour of spectacular femme fatale lips or racy satin lingerie.  I think it's my new favourite A90. I still don't adore the A90, but I appreciate it fondly, and I'll defend it all day against the morons who moan because BMW worked with Toyota on the car and supply a lot of the parts - like BMW is bad at making performance cars all of a sudden? Anyway, newsflash, all cars are built with parts bought from suppliers, a lot of whom supply parts to multiple manufacturers. No Toyota is purely a Toyota, they buy components from dozens, maybe hundreds of firms. It's always been this way - or did you think Daimler forged all his own nuts and bolts?

Number four is maybe my favourite car of the bunch, the one and only fantasy car of the pack, the Dimachinni Veloce.  Named for its designer Dmitriy "Dima" Shakhmatov, another man who enjoyed naming cars after himself and whose nickname can often be found as a sponsor decal, it's a car that naturally belongs in a group with the El Segundo Coupe and Glory Chaser, as an extremely credible gestalt pastiche of a European sports car racer, in this case a '70s Italianate wedge with British hints.  HW have just about perfected the art of the Muscle Car pastiche, but in recent years as their Euro and Japanese selection has grown, so too has their ability to use the design languages of these types of cars. The Dimachinni Veloce evokes Maserati Bora or Khamsin and De Tomaso Mangusta to me, a bit of Lamborghini Espada and maybe a pinch of Lancia 037 too, but seen alongside the Alfa Romeo GTV6 3.0 it bears a striking resemblance to that too, if one were to flatten the Alfa a bit (credit to Joe Eldridge of Ignition Diecast for this insight - his Yuuchoobe channel is a daily visit for me, an always interesting and entertaining place for collectors of little toy cars and a great exercise in zero-prep, zero-pretention, just-sit-down-and-speak-your-mind videos like Youtube was always supposed to be, and he has an epic archiving project happening too, collecting all the main line Hot Wheels since 1968 and showing each as he adds it to the archive).

And then there's hints of Lotus Elite or Aston Martin V8 sneaking in too.  The rear view is particularly interesting with the intensely Khamsin-esque glass across the entire back of the car (compare below with my Kyosho Khamsin, a car I still can't believe I found in a Junk shop in 上田市), spare wheel and louvred window.  The front meanwhile has the bonnet (complete with GTV6 3.0-like bulge) formed from the interior piece for colour contrast, which is especially striking here since it's chrome.  The black with gold detail is a minor theme among this year's main line releases, with the BMW 6 series, Bentley Continental GT3 and Lamborghini Miura, and looks no less gorgeous than any of them.

This type of car is why Hot Wheels appeals to me, though - it's marvellous to behold the level of design ability that sees to the heart of an existing car design, can draw out features that can evoke those designs without copying them, and then integrates them into fictional designs that are credible enough that they can easily be mistaken for real cars, and do it with such verve and authoritative confidence.  Shakhmatov also designed the Maxima, and many other great castings, but this is probably my favourite, and apparently he was most recently in charge of premium castings, but left Mattel in 2023.

My only other one of these is again a first version, a blue rally version.  I never encountered the green Alitalia-looking version from 2023 but it's on the list, near the top.

Lastly from this pack, there's the Subaru.  This Subaru Impreza GR WRX STI is a 2011 model, the last year that WRX was a version of the Impreza - the WRX became a separate model from 2012 onwards.  GR in this case is indicating a widebody hatchback, the only available body for the STI that year. It's hard to ascertain since there are a great many special editions and so on of the Impreza, but this could be the second Cosworth in this pack.  A Cosworth-tuned Impreza called the CS400 was made in a limited edition of 75 only, and to this day remains the hottest over-the-counter Subaru out there (there must be 1000-hp Subarus out there at this point, though those will all be homebrewed).

I was very unsure about the pink when I saw photos, I think pink cars are hard to do well without getting unnecessarily camp or tacky very quickly, but in person it's a lovely rich shade, warm and floral despite the metallic zing.  A Subaru is a natural choice for pink, though, since the STI logotype is pink.

In the end my qualms about the colour match with the trajectory of my feeling about the car itself, though; I was never a fan of the Impreza hatchback and originally intended to skip this casting, preferring to stick to saloon-bodied Imprezas, but in fact this pink one is my 5th Subaru hatchback. I unexpectedly received the yellow 2021 one as a freebie in a package of other cars from a seller on Mercari when I lived in Japan.  I was delighted by this kind gesture and the car became a fond favourite, eventually getting rubber wheels, a roof sunburst tampo and a sticker-bomb tampo on the front bumper, an interior swap and even a cameo in Deliverance book 3, and getting me into hatchback Imprezas generally.  Later I built this red 2022 lifted one with oversized wheels (filing the wheel arches was a nightmare, it still doesn't roll freely, but I'm still proud of this, isn't it neat?), and bought the beautiful metalflake navy colour variant.  The fifth, the black one, is part of the 2019 Backroad Rally set, a collection I as a rally car lover felt uncharacteristically obliged to get all of.

That's all from this five pack, and from part 1, but not all from the Nightburnerz series. In part 2 I'll examine what 'Nightburnerz' actually means...

[secretcatpolicy]

Recently I wrote about the new Hot Wheels model of the Bertone-designed Lancia Stratos Zero, a legendary concept car I'd wanted to see in diecast form for most of my life, and I got to thinking. Long ago I had a Corgi model of the Alfa Romeo Carabo, another extremely influential Bertone concept car… if that existed, what other famed concept cars of that era had been released? Quite a few, it seems:

So I went to ebay, and found what I could that was affordable and not too destroyed. In order to keep it affordable and available, it's all a bit played with, but mostly in OK condition, easily enough to get a feel for these cars. We'll start with the Carabo. This car has the distinction of being the first ever to feature scissor doors, predating the Countach which Marcello Gandini at Bertone also designed and reused the concept on, but thanks to the attention it got it also basically introduced the idea of the 'wedge car'. Prior to this, the high-end sports car had been curvy and sensuous, and the mechanical, angular, louvre-happy look was a new direction entirely, and caused a sensation in 1968 when it was first shown, in metallic green; even today it looks much more recent than 1968, and I've seen it used on the cover of more than one Synthwave album where it fits right in. While not intended for production, only as a styling exercise, it was built on an Alfa Romeo P33 chassis and like most of the concepts of the time was a fully functional, viably roadworthy car. So much of this design went on to influence what supercars looked like, it's a really vital design to know in the evolution of car design.

This model was part of a Corgi series called Rockets, which came with a 'tune up key' that you could insert in the base and twist to pop off the chassis, which allowed me to use a small flat-head screwdriver to do the same and swap out the typically nasty Corgi wheels for some HW ones, which look a lot better, without all the usual hassle of drilling out the rivets (this is often particularly annoying on Corgis as they frequently use domed rivets that are a nightmare to centre a drill bit on). The chrome green and grey lower section look great, and quite closely resemble the real car, which is named for Carabidae beetles which have very shiny green carapaces with orange parts.

Another Corgi Rocket model that popped up when I searched was the Bizzarini Manta. Bizzarini is a lesser-known Italian carmaker, and most of what they made was sports racers (Matchbox made a beautiful Moving Parts Bizzarini 5300 racer recently which I'm hoping to get sometime), but in 1969 they hired the then-new Italdesign studio, headed by legendary designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, to create the Manta. It has a 3-seat cabin with the driver in the centre, pre-empting McLaren's use of this idea in the F1 by nearly 30 years, features a unique venetian blind-like front thingy that can be opened for better city driving visibility and closed for high speed driving, and was built on a retired P538 Le Mans racer chassis, with a 5.3L Chevrolet V8 in the back, forward of the rear axle. The design was the first 'one-box' GT car, with engine, passengers and (in this case entirely theoretical) luggage sharing a single volume, cemented the future of Giugiaro and the Italdesign studio, and like the Carabo still looks futuristic and hard to locate in time.

The real car was briefly silver but quickly got a bright turquoise gloss repaint - the Corgi version is metallic and a lot darker, but still looks good. This one had even worse wheels than the Carabo, and worse, had oversize ones that gave it oversized arches, which in turn made it hard to find appropriate replacement wheels - these are from a Majorette, I'm not that into them and may well replace them later - but they are an improvement on the train-like originals, trust me.

Having found a legendary Bertone and a legendary ItalDesign, I then set out to find a legendary Pininfarina, and to my shock, succeeded. For a long time the Pininfarina design agency were the only ones used by Ferrari, and in common with many, they often used retired racing cars as the cores of designs they relied on to showcase design talent and thus drum up business, and that's the origin of the Ferrari 512 S Modulo. Pininfarina and Bertone were rivals, and in 1970 when Bertone showed the extreme, space-age Stratos Zero, the Modulo was Pininfarina's answer. Where the Stratos Zero evoked the technology of spaceflight, the Modulo evoked the technology of science fiction, arguably even more ludicrously extreme with its sliding canopy, cutaways for the tops of the wheels and mirrored top and bottom shells complete with false windows on the lower sides. The panels to the rear of the side windows were retractable cooling ducts for the engine bay, much like the 'bat wings' on the Lamborghini Murcielago.

I'm really happy to have a model of the Modulo, but it comes with a twinge of disappointment - it's frankly kind of goofy. Every photo I've ever seen of the Modulo is a low-angle shot that makes the most of its flying saucer-esque profile, and these do not reveal quite how much the car looks like a bar of half-used soap from a higher angle, but holding a diecast of it does; its rounded corners and straight sides just aren't quite as attractive in three dimensions, and allegedly the car was so low-slung that it was hard to see out. While it was a fully running car, it seems clear that the Modulo was made focusing on styling ideas over usability.

Corgi came through again with this yellow version which has somehow retained its original sticker representing the car's rear window with engine cooling holes. Even though the car was originally black and is most often pictured in its later white colour scheme, the yellow works too, at least now that I've added the black panels. A kit car version was featured in the often overlooked but surprisingly good early Tommy Lee Jones movie Black Moon.

Returning to Bertone and staying with Corgi, there's also this 1969 Autobianchi A112 Runabout Barchetta (misspelled on the base as "barghetta") by Marcello Gandini. Barchetta is an Italian word for a small boat that is sometimes applied to open cars without glass, but in this case it was particularly apt: it's inspired by racing powerboats of the time and at early stages of the design, this car was intended to be amphibious, leading to the open, doorless form, the high rear-mounted headlights and high ground clearance, but this idea was later dropped. It was based on the chassis of the popular Autobianchi A112 supermini, and shared the tiny car's 1.1L inline 4, so was in a different class from most of the others here, but like the Modulo was mostly intended to showcase ideas. The production Fiat X1/9 was ultimately based on this car's design, and elements, particularly the form of the front wheel arches and the spoiler, were used on the production Lancia Stratos. I wouldn't call it a lovely car, but it looks fun for living a life in warm, beachy climes.

This casting was apparently recycled as a Wonder Woman car at some point, and is often found with a WW sticker on the front. It was also cast by Matchbox, and there seems to be a 1:32ish Corgi version too. I must admit to being confused as to why this car in particular was so widely produced. But it must have its fans, as Bertone recently made a modernised version.

Another Bertone, but Matchbox this time: the Lamborghini Marzal from 1967. Designed as a four-seater using a 2.0L straight six that was basically one side of a standard Lamborghini 4.0L V12, Bertone aimed to complement the grand tourers Lamborghini made, but it was not really a serious try at a production model so much as a piece of promotional art that was aimed at shocking the motoring press into giving Lamborghini attention at a fraction of the price of advertising. That said, it also formed the basis for the later design of the more conventional but still Lamborghini-weird Espada. In the Marzal's case the whole car is based on a hexagon motif, an idea that later worked out well for the Countach too, and is almost entirely glassed-in (this model has a metal roof, assumedly for stiffness, but the real car's roof was fully glass), necessitating a full air-con system. Its gullwing doors skip the b-pillar entirely and run the length of the silver-upholstered cabin, and the hexagon-shaped louvres on the back are particularly distinctive. It first appeared at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix, driven by Prince Ranier III and his wife Princess Grace, best known as Grace Kelly; the suspension was still a work in progress at the time, so the car did a parade lap of the circuit with an anvil in the boot to level the car.

Matchbox made this model way back in the day, choosing crimson instead of the more conservative silver the car was debuted in, or the white it later wore. Like a number of '70s castings, it was also reissued in a variety of colours (including this green) in the form of a Super GT, Matchbox's late '80s budget line, with further reduced window area, full-black windows that hide its lack of interior and all hint of what it really was scrubbed from the base, presumably to evade copyright issues.

The last thing in this group is a bit of an outlier: the Nissan 126X concept from 1970. Relatively speaking I know a lot less about this, but it's another piece of the strategy Japan's carmakers used to signify the country's industrial maturation in the eyes of the world. The Toyota 2000GT had launched to wide acclaim a few years before, Nissans were beating Porsches in races, and at the Tokyo motor show of 1970 many marques including Toyota, Mazda and Nissan addressed the matter of forward-thinking design. Toyota showed the EX-7, Mazda debuted the RX500 and Nissan this, a 4-seat gullwing wedge with a rear-mid straight six mounted sideways and driving all four wheels - or at least that's the idea, as I'm not sure this was actually a functioning prototype. This was nonetheless kitted out with a steering yoke rather than a wheel but the most interesting and innovative feature was a series of coloured lights up the front of the car intended to signal to other motorists what the car was doing, with red for braking, yellow for constant speed and green for acceleration. I don't honestly love this car, but of all of them it might be the only one that tries not only to look futuristic and showcase design, but also evolve how people drive.

Nissan was exporting under the Datsun brand at the time, which I assume is why Matchbox seem to have named it Datsun 126X despite the Nissan text visible on the rear quarter in period shots of the car. Rather than the pleasing lightly metallic blue-grey two-tone of the show car, Matchbox in their infinite wisdom seem to have opted for a yellow over orange two-tone with amber glass, which looks surprisingly all right but is not a patch on the much classier original colour scheme. This has also been released with flame stickers on the yellow and, like the Marzal, in various colours as a Super GT.

All these weird and wonderful designs are one-off show pieces that have only one true job: to inspire. These are quite literally imagination made concrete and tangible and sharable, and the supercar concepts of the late '60s and early '70s are in my view what make this era the golden age of the concept car. It's cars like these more than any that gave me the enthusiasm I have for car design and which inform how I look at all cars, but especially rarities I'll very rarely if ever even see, let alone have a chance to drive. In some cases, finding diecasts was my introduction to the existence of quite a lot of cars, and it felt to young me like admission to a secret hidden area of car knowledge; the Carabo I remember reading about but, in the pre-internet wasteland of the '80s, I had no idea what it looked like until the Corgi fell into my lap. This bunch right here are the root of why I collect diecasts and write this blog, and there are more to find! Sometimes people write these types of car off as pointless, but to me they are an absolute necessity if you want a healthy car industry that makes people want to buy cars. These cars are made to move you in a less conventional way, and that's why these worn old toys from before I was even born are some of my very favourites.

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I'm delighted that I got this new Matchbox Morgan Plus Four.

I adore Morgans; always have. While they are less than practical in most cases, they tick every other box for me. Let's explore what Morgans are and why I love them.

Morgan is a British company - which is still fully true to my knowledge, because in this ridiculous world we currently occupy, there are degrees to this sort of statement. MG was a British company, got acquired by a Chinese consortium and, with its cars built in China, is in no sense beyond the historical a British company; Land Rover still build its cars in the UK but it's owned by Tata of India. Are Land Rover still British? I'd say yes, but it's arguable. But Morgan is owned partly by the family of founder Henry Morgan (along with a private equity group, because you can't fucking escape the bullshit of 2025) and operate from Malvern in Worcestershire (pronounced "WOOstersheer"), as it has since 1909. This is crucial in understanding what Morgan is about; the company is a small-volume producer, because they still build all their cars by hand.

No robots, no mass-production. Every single one is bespoke, uniquely built to the customer's specifications, and as someone with an incessant urge to customise everything this is an extremely appealing attribute. It's hard to overstate how much I like the idea of a coachbuilt car made by craftspeople with decades of experience, but with modern technology and reliability. They have three models presently, the Plus Four, the Supersport and the Super 3 (recently made by Hot Wheels). Past models included the 4/4 with 4 seats, the +8 with a V8 and the Aero, which was an enclosed and streamlined model, along with a whole tine of 3-wheelers.

They are largely aluminium in construction, with a wooden subframe, which makes them very light. Of course, the look is iconic and dates back to around 1936, revised a little in 1950 and not much since, although it's often tweaked and given modernised tech. Morgan don't make their own engines, and the current range use BMW inline engines for the 4-wheelers (a 2-litre B48B20O1 turbo i4 making 255 hp for the Plus Four, and a 335hp B58B30C i6 with a twin-scroll turbo for the Supersport) and a Ford 3-cylinder for the 3-wheeler Super 3. Past models have used Ford, Mazda and Rover engines

They're all RWD, with auto or manual options that hit 60 in about 5 seconds in the Plus Four, and a sub 4-second 60 via auto only in the Supersport. What results is a sports car in the classic sense that Mazda was aiming for with the MX-5, not brutally powerful or transcendently fast but small, low, responsive, agile and focused on being fun to drive. They have only the space behind the seats for cargo, plus an optional rack on the back, and while third-party rigid hardtops exist there's no factory option, so they'd be pretty hard to live with as primary everyday cars, but as a car for enjoying driving, and as drivable art, I think there's probably none better.

Notably with this, it's basically exactly the same size as the 1:55 Siku +8, which is odd, as the little figures are supposed to be 1:75 scale but seem pretty well fitted to the car. The Super 3 is a bit larger scale, while the Majorette (the more battered green one, which has HW real riders but is very much not a HW model) is a touch longer. The inability of diecast makers to stick to a single scale drives me up the wall.

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I've had a good week for diecast acquisitions, bringing forth a rainbow of neat stuff and a rare chance to take a few shots outside:

I discovered some cars from the G case for the first time, including the badass Kia EV6 custom. I had already decided to grab one of these on the grounds of not having enough Korean cars, the nice colour and itasha (or Korean equivalent; on which note, as best I can tell the word 귀여운 apparently means 'cuteness' and is pronounced 'gwiyomi') livery, but the real treat here is the significantly more custom bodywork than I had originally realised. Not only does the car boast widebody flared arches and an aggressive ducktail spoiler, the front chin spoiler forms an unbroken ramp up behind the 'grille' much as you might find on racing supercars like the Ferrari 488 Pista, and continues at the same angle with barely a crease up to the roofline, and the rear window tapers inside the car's bodywork much as seen on the Ford Supervan IV (the quest for peace) and VW T3 custom. Inside, the car has a central driver's seat as you'd find in a McLaren F1 and all other seats are eliminated. Whatever your attitude to electric cars, the degree of customisation deserves all respect.

Another purple addition to the collection from the G assortment is this much more conventional 1968 Dodge Dart, with no more specific name given, but the hood scoop and stance implies this is a Dart Hemi with a 7-litre engine, built y Hurst for drag competition. The visuals are superb with fantastic striping fully appropriate to the era. I've seen the Dart many times but never found one I really liked until now. Everything here is exactly as I'd expect for a drag-spec muscle car except one thing: it's part of the 2025 'Compact Kings' series. This being a compact car makes absolutely no sense to me - but then I am a European and how Americans classify their cars has always totally confused me, so I might as well admit defeat. Sure, it's a compact car. 'Compact' is about interior volume, not, like, how big the whole car is. Whatever.

From that same series comes this, the 1976 Chevrolet Chevette. While the Dart seems likely to be a drag spec car, this is undeniably one, as attested by the NHRA livery and wheelie bar. I'm not that into drag racing but I do love a hot hatchback, and besides, it's based on the T-car platform that in the UK became the Vauxhall Chevette, one of the earliest British-built hatchbacks, and a car that was still on the roads when I was a kid learning how to spot cars. Its shovel nose was an easy tell in traffic. I still remember the weird feeling of realising 'Chevette' was a name that had to have come from Chevrolet rather than Vauxhall, and that the GM badge really did mean it was at least sort of American, just like Ford was sort of American, even if they were built here and not sold over there. Understanding global markets is tough when you've barely started school.

There was a Matchbox restock too, and I was able to finally come across something I was annoyed to miss the first time: the Radical Motorsports SR3 XXR. This is a fabulous roofless track car that seems designed to be a baby Ferrari 333 SP. Rather than the Ferrari's V12, Radical generally kits their cars out with a 1.5 litre Suzuki GSX-R inline-4 from the Hayabusa sport bike, reworked by Radical's own performance engines subsidiary, making 232hp in a car weighing 720kg. They even make a street-legal version. They run in one-make racing series all over the world and Radical have made over 1100 of them; this car feels like discovering a cool secret.

Another Matchbox I was overjoyed to find was the 1970 Citroen 2CV, often known as the "deux cheveaux" (a word which, as a kid, I was convinced was spelled "dershavoh" based on how it sounds). This is one of those diminutive, cheap, simple 'people's cars' that just make you smile. They are all dreadful boneshakers by any modern standard, but the Beetle, the Cinquecento, the Mini, the Isetta, the Maluch, the Subaru 360 all have the same quality of chunky, squat, vaguely comical dumpiness of proportion that makes them silly for everyone and therefore demeaning to no-one. We all lack dignity extracting ourselves from one of these things; they are great levellers. The snail-like 2CV in this case is maybe doing double duty; I believe it may be a stealth Bond Car, the most well-known appearance of a yellow 2CV being in the semi-comical but no less awesome for it chase scene in For Your Eyes Only. Best Roger Moore Bond film, no question.

Matchboxes are 3 for 2 in Tesco, so for the third I grabbed a curious but not unfamiliar model, the Coast 2 Coast. I don't know much about boats but the detail touches on this model appeal to me, with a set of scuba gear on the swim deck and a coiled rope in the bow as well as cast propellors underneath. Given the recent throwback fantasy castings coming out of Mattel, like the Rapid Pulse and Slide-Burn from HW that resemble Matchbox fantasy models of the 70s and the return of the fantasy MBX Field Car as both an enclosed and this year also open-top, a rework of another 70s Matchbox, I wonder if this is a modernised call back to the old Police Launch. It's an extremely coherent design and I'll be surprised if I don't get more of them in future.

Meanwhile, in the German supermarket quarter, Aldi continues to have an excellent HW restocking policy. They had got a B case in shortly before I got there, so the R32 Skyline that appears in the background of Han's funeral in Fast & Furious 7 hadn't been plucked. I have a few R32s but I do like to have iconic versions of cars where possible. The road car was usually promoted in a dark grey metallic finish, and while I did plan to buy the Tomica Premium version eventually, events conspired to shut that door for me before 'eventually' arrived. This is a very attractive and understated rendition of this car and the metalflake paint is a lot nicer than plain gloss. Mind you, for all I prefer the car to the R33 or R34, I think I'm done for R32s, though; a reasonably-priced Advan Team Transport (together with the truck) or an exceptional new colour scheme is about all that I would really consider at this point.

Across the car park from Aldi is Lidl, which on my first visit had no diecasts at all, but last time in addition to a quick raid on the bakery I stumbled on a basket of 2024 D case Hot Wheels, a box that seemed to completely evade Tesco, Poundland, Home Bargains and all the local dedicated toyshops alike. From it, this week I plucked the 2010 Chevy Camaro SS in acid green, one of a number of HW concept cars that have transitioned to become emergency vehicles once their novelty fades and part of the 'first response' series. This phrase, near-exclusive to American English and therefore exotic in its unfamiliarity, is intriguing to me since it covers a huge variety of types of emergency personnel: cops, medics and firefighters, certainly, but also dogcatchers, coastguards, biohazard cleanup guys, community nurses, plumbers…and with the 'RESPONSE TEAM' graphics, this tough, fast and undeniably cool emergency vehicle gives no clues as to who would drive it or what response their team will bring.

Finally, the Hot Wheels universe has been going bonkers for the Silhouettes premium series. Needless to say, the one shop I can easily reach that has any premiums has seen no sign of these, and is still clogged with Exotic Envy Aston Martin V12 Speedsters nobody wants - but in a rare flash of sense, Amazon had some in stock. Not the RWB, of course, or the Nissans, or even the Mazda, but the McLaren. The McLaren 720S with Liberty Walk LB-Works body kit may be in the shadow of the RWB and Liberty Walk R34 skyline in its debut, but unlike both of them, it's a fantastic colour. HW metallic teal is one of my favourite colours for cars, and as soon as I saw pics of this series I knew I'd be focusing on the McLaren. Most McLarens don't move me particularly and I don't have any other 720s, but the bolt-on widebody and silly wing bring much-needed personality to what I've always considered an anodyne and forgettable blob of a car. The complicated contours show off the shine of the paint, and without a coloured livery to portray, the dodgy inkjet-looking tampos that plague recent HW premiums aren't an issue, as I expect they are with the R34 and Mazda. As a result I find myself revising my opinion on the 720S while I gaze at the sparking turquoise thing on the desk and catch myself enjoying design I'd previously rejected. It's nice finding new stuff to enjoy.

That said, though, the Silhouettes series is a mess and I'm surprised people are so into it. I will admit on paper this is a great roster, but the actual designs are for the most part a big letdown. The RWB is a basic-ass colour (so many people have called it 'clean', but if that's you, I have news you won't like: there's a high risk you have boring taste), the R34 has a deco that's already been done twice (and pretty badly on the R35), the 300ZX is an uninteresting and rather half-hearted pastiche of the Calsonic livery and the Mazda is just fugly, licenced livery though it may be. The scalpers can fight over them.

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The Bertone styling house is probably the most influential in creating what a 'supercar' looks like. The late '60s and early '70s was the golden era of the wedge-shaped one-of-one concept car and one of the pinnacles of the paradigm, in my view, is this: Marcello Gandini's space-age concept, the Lancia Stratos HF Zero, named to evoke the edge of the stratosphere, the border of space.

This is the very extreme of car design, way beyond utility and into art. When it was first shown, this car was a metalflake copper orange, and was intended to appear carved from a single block of bronze (note the lack of panel seams visible anywhere) but was later resprayed silver. This car is, it must be acknowledged, ludicrous; it's actually hard to fully take in without comparing it to known things like people or other cars because its form is so different. Here are some charming period shots of the car alongside a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and an apparent cowgirl aviator who's just finished her bombing run and is keen to get home in her Stratos Zero:

The Ford GT40 is so named because it's only 40 inches tall, a fact that clearly made a big impression for that to be the origin of it's name; the Stratos Zero is 33.3 inches tall, due to the remit given to Gandini being to make the lowest possible car, and the occupants (there is a passenger seat) essentially lie down to drive, like luge riders, sliding into the oncoming world feet first.

The windscreen is the door and hinges open at the top like a glazed trapdoor, allowing the steering column to hinge forward on hydraulics. You step inside and duck under the roof sill as you recline on the chocolate bar-like seats. The black panels to the rear of the front wheels are the side windows, allowing you to see the ankles of pedestrians and wheel nuts of other traffic in perfect detail, along with the wing mirrors housed inside the front wheel arches.

While cars like this would become the main application of the pop-up headlight, this doesn't have them. Instead there are ten small lights across the slot on the front, and the rear lights house 80+ tiny red bulbs (well before the advent of LEDs, after all). The car is in fact the first use of sequential indicators, opting to animate the front and rear lights instead of using anything as vulgar as orange indictor lights.

Few concepts before this were this extreme yet functional. Bertone showed the Alfa Romeo Carabo in 1968, and the month before this was shown, Pininfarina displayed the almost equally spacecraft-like Ferrari 512 S Modulo. This car is built from the crashed remains of a Lancia Fulvia Coupé 1.6 HF rally car, the modest (113hp) but rally-tuned 1.6L V4 engine housed beneath the side-hinged triangular louvres, and was constructed without Lancia's knowledge. A couple of months prior to the reveal, Nuccio Bertone came clean to Lancia and asked to put a Lancia badge on what his firm had built. Lancia wanted to see it, so he drove it through Milan, which looked like this:

As I heard it, the gate guard at Lancia was only aware Bertone had arrived when he drove under the barrier, not bothering to sign in. It's the kind of car where these possibly apocryphal stories are made plausible by the implausibility of the car itself; if impossibilities like this could be real, who knows what can happen? In a way the point of one-off concepts like this is to make us dream, push us to imagine better futures where cars like this roam the streets. It certainly pushed Lancia, who observed the buzz around this car and commissioned Bertone to co-build with them a car to replace the Fulvia Coupé that would improve on the Fulvia's already impressive rally record.

That, Bertone did, and even retained the name; a straight line exists between this car and Lancia's legendary status in rallying. The Stratos HF prototype was first shown in 1971, entered production in 1973 and was homologated for rally in 1974, winning the rally chamionship for three years running until internal politics at the FIAT group meant factory support for Lancia rallying was pulled.

The Stratos Zero also caught Lamborghini's eye, and Gandini was hired to design a successor for the Miura. Along with the wedge profile, the early Countach shared the upswept cowling on the rear wheel and the chocolate-bar seats, and the flat, extremely-pitched windscreen, although Gandini reused the scissor doors from the Carabo rather than retaining the hatch-like door/window.

I've been waiting for this model for about 30 years. It appeared in a favourite book of mine in its silver guise, and compared to the copper orange I think it's immeasurably better looking, even if that's its original look. When the recent Hammer Drop series debuted the casting in orange I was disappointed, but luckily I was able to find this silver version from the Marcello Gandini two-pack on its own on ebay for barely over the price of a single car (I already had the red Countach 5000QV from the Jay Leno series, naturally). I understand the Stratos Zero is kind of unpopular compared to other cars in that series, but the only reason I can imagine is that people perhaps understandably don't realise it's not a fantasy car, or at least not entirely. I think it's a stretch to call it fully real either.

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A comparative rarity here: you seldom find the same vehicle from two manufacturers. The same general car in different colours, sure, but not replicas of specifically the exact same car.

Both Tomica (always on the left) and Hot Wheels (always on the right) made models of the Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 based on the appearance of the car when it was revealed in 2019, with what Lamborghini call 'electric gold' paint - my impression is that it's a complex iridescent metallic paint with a green-gold shift that's hard to photograph in the same way Nissan's famous Midnight Purple III paint is. The car is a limited-run special model, based on the Aventador but with Lamborghini's first hybrid system, a curious system integrating an electric motor and supercapacitor into the gearbox. This is less a system to provide higher speed than it is a system powering low-speed manoeuvring and reversing, ideally preventing the whole overheating-and-catching-fire-in-Monaco-traffic schtick unique to owners of insanely expensive cars with enormous engines designed to be cooled by airflow (pic related):

The supercapacitor replaces the more common but much heavier battery pack and will barely power the car for more than a couple of kilometres, making this particular hybrid system unique in concept, not to mention almost entirely useless for improving fuel economy or reducing emissions. As a result this is Lamborghini's most powerful car ever at 807hp.

Unusually, no bulls were referenced in the naming of the car. 'Sián' is a Bolognese dialect word meaning a flash of lightning (becuz hybrid but also real fast, geddit?) but the 'FKP 37' references instead Ferdinand Karl Piëch, 1937-2019, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and eventually chairman of Volkswagen, overseeing the purchase of Lamborghini by the VW group and essentially saving the company from bankruptcy (for about the 54th time). They made 63 of them, and 19 roadsters. I can't say it's a particular favourite of mine, mixing as it does the familiar Lamborghini look with the excessively sci-fi styling of the 2017 Terzo Millenio concept. I find it rather egregious, overstyled and kind of ugly, yet still somehow appealing.

Since I want at least one example of every car I even vaguely like (i.e. every Lamborghini except the Veneno), I pre-ordered the No.89 Tomica sight-unseen in 2021 when it appeared (delayed by COVID from 2020) on Amazon.jp, but later found the HW 2021 debut version going cheap on there and realised I could really do an apples-to-apples comparison in this case. Both are almost identically sized, although the Tomica is heavier.

First, colour. For me the Tomica wins this, with a deeper more complex lustre to the green-gold and a little more shade variation with angle. By comparison the HW is perhaps more metallic, but thinner and flatter. However, the deciding factor to me is detail - where the HW has a tampo Lamborghini badge and detail around the headlights and front corner aero leading up over the wheel arch vents, on the Tomica this detail is painted in satin slate grey (I added the silver around the lights), and continues around the bottom of the windscreen, on the side intakes, rear wheel arches and stabilising fins at the ends of the spoiler while HW leaves all this body-coloured, using the interior piece for the side intakes (I added the black detail myself on the HW version). The Tomica also has a Lamborghini badge tampo. From a different perspective, HW has made 4 colour variants and one more is coming later this year, while Tomica had 4 in total, 2 of which were rare limited editions, before discontinuing the model.

in terms of sculpting, the Tomica again is the better of the two. The HW ends the roof glass too far back, omits engine cover seams and the filler cap is barely defined, leaving the top rear insufficiently defined. The air channels at the base of the windscreen are part of the metal on the Tomica but part of the window on the HW, but the HW has wipers where the Tomica omits them, and both omit mirrors. The window piece over the engine is is well defined on both, but the rough-textured side windows let the HW down. Using the interior for the side intakes is a great idea, though, and adds potential for interesting colour variation in future versions.

The rear view is probably where the two models most differ. The HW uses tampos on the interior piece for the lights and plate, also using a tampo to add the green of the lower diagonal bodywork pieces and appearing to have a horizontal seam in the centre which doesn't actually exist on the real car. However, it adds a licence plate with authentic Lamborghini typography. The Tomica integrates the whole light assembly into the metal body and uses the base for the vent and exhausts, but omits the plate entirely. The exhausts came painted silver on the Tomica whereas I had to add that detail myself on the HW. The diffuser is more accurate to reality on the Tomica.

Underneath, the Tomica is also better, with a little chassis detail along with scale information, whereas the HW is almost entirely smooth and as ever has no scale. Note both were originally riveted and the M2 bolts and washers are my addition.

Where wheels are concerned, main line Hot Wheels will win over Classic Tomica almost every time. Classic Tomica vehicles' main weakness is the lamentable and honestly incomprehensible lack of wheel variety, modernity and detail (whereas with Premiums, the opposite is true - while they lack rubber tyres, every Premium Tomica gets unique wheels corresponding to the real car's wheels, elevating them above HW premiums in my view). That being said, the gold ring on the Tomica doesn't look bad, and the chrome wears better than the HW chrome. These HW wheels look really nice on this colour of car and for once, praise be, they resisted the temptation to make the back wheels bigger.

Looking inside we can discover the last secrets of the Sián. The HW has more credible reclined seats, but the engine detail is lacking compared to the Tomica, which also has a better-defined steering wheel and potentially has room to fit a driver figure if you're into that. It's also interesting to note how different the sculpt of the central console is, though I haven't seen a picture of the car's interior so I can't say which is more realistic.

Hope you enjoyed this compare and contrast exercise; if I had to nominate a 'winner' it would be the Tomica, but maybe with the HW wheels swapped in. Only two other noteworthy things here: 1) the Tomica has suspension, which is a delightful but pointless feature that is appealing as a tactile feature inasmuch as it's fun to press on the roof and feel it go ba-dump ba-dump, and 2) what the hell is that rectangle embossed into the base just in front of the rear axle all about? It appears on the inside of many, but not all HW car bases and here as in most it is entirely hidden and contains no markings or indication of its purpose.

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Another alfa for your enjoyment, here's the 155 V6 Ti.

This is Hot Wheels Boulevard No. 55, released in 2022, the debut release for this casting. The car is a racing variant of the car, obviously, and raced in the DTM series. This livery is a recreation of the 1993 car driven by Nicola Larini for factory team Alfa Corse, who won the series that year and took the car to first place in 11 of the 22 races. This is a record which has never been surpassed.

I've got to admit I have never really clicked with Alfa Romeo. There are numerous really cool Alfas, but Alfa Romeo are a pretty general manufacturer with a broad range, and there's little overall coherence to the marque that really creates a particular identity that a lot of other manufacturers manage to give their cars. However, I think this model brought me a little closer to what attracts people to Alfas.

To my eye the 155 is typical of many Alfa Romeos in that it's not a very special car in everyday road car form; perfectly OK and a lot better than many cars, but not especially a car that you'd notice. My particular enthusiasm is for rally cars, a field Alfa Romeo have not particularly dominated. What interests me with rally is the idea of taking an everyday car and developing it, elevating it, improving it to reach speeds and cross terrain it was never meant to, to become something recognisable and yet utterly unlike what it began as, to entirely transcend what it was intended to be. Touring car racing generally begins with more high-end cars so it doesn't really strike me in the same way usually, but that transcendent spirit is visible in this 155.

It feels underdoggy and raw as a racer, and has the same energy for me as the Metro 6R4, an everyday car turned into a rampaging beast with a boxy ugly bodykit, lunatic V6 and 4WD. And as I read further about it, I learned that it inherited much of the internal workings of what is probably my favourite "if-you-could-only-have-one" car, the Lancia Delta Integrale, itself a serial winner and holder of a never-bettered record in rallying. Accordingly, I pay a lot more attention to Alfas now.

This is a really good model, and a great example of what premium Hot Wheels ought to be. Not only is the cross and Biscione livery gloriously detailed and, fuzzy rear quarter Alfa Corse graphics aside, beautifully sharp, the car has multiple parts, including a printed spoiler and a really great full roll cage piece too, like they used to in the good old days. I love a good roll cage!

Isn't it a brilliant piece of work, though? This is what a premium model should be. It also shows why I routinely open up my cars - to appreciate the fine workmanship fully and add some extra touches to the interior that really make it shine, like the 12 o'clock mark, seatbelts, handbrake and fire extinguisher (I did wonder about a shade band, but I'm unconvinced). If only all premiums were this well made, they might start to approach value for money.

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An elegy for a pegwarmer: the Alfa Romeo GTV6 3.0, a car that despite being really cool has flown off the pegs much like a dead butterfly doesn't. This is a rare South African-exclusive homologation special built in Pretoria to battle BMWs in SA touring car racing and successful in that aim, the strongest strain of a car with the legendary Busso V6 engine that won rallies, won Touring Car races, took second overall at the 24 hours of Spa. It was a pretty car with glory coming out of its ears, logically it should sell like hot cakes. So why are these clogging all the dump bins?

My diagnosis is the lack of a good set of graphics. The Fraser Campbell sculpt and debut #6 race livery was all right - I missed the red one, which I wanted, and snagged the white version as one of the first two Hot Wheels I bought (shout out to Matalan, the most unexpected yet surprisingly and consistently fruitful local HW source I've found yet) on getting back to the Untied Kingdom from Japan, the other being the red Pajero Evo. I had been really excited to learn the GTV6 was coming out but rather underwhelmed by what we eventually got. The awesome new wheels were the best thing about it.

Next was the World Tour premium version in plain red, which was nice, if a bit undistinguished, but 1) only a very small number of places near me sell premiums, 2) I had virtually no money and 3) having gotten used to paying ¥899($5.96US) for HW premiums, finding they were now £9($11.63US) a pop elicited a big large "fuck that!" from me (and I'm certain many people have it worse where HW prices are concerned, and you have my sympathy, but on a purely personal level this is just too much for me to consider anything but very occasional premiums, and only when they are discounted).

And then came the 2024 releases. Under shop lights this metalflake blue just doesn't look great, and seems not quite the right colour for an Alfa, particularly not a hot Alfa like this, it lacked the nice 4-poke wheels, and my inclination was to pass. I kept telling myself to just get this but when it came to it there was always a better option, until today. Happily I find I don't regret it at all when viewed under my own lighting, even if it is missing its Quadrifoglio badge.

One thing's for sure: it is much better than the other 2024 colour, the light grey. I can swallow the blue as a colour they might have offered in 1983, but I just can't fathom what made them choose that colour for this car. It's such a 2020s colour, absolutely wrong for this era of car. Matte, as a primer coat on an in-progress restoration project is plausible, and silver works, but not gloss putty grey. Still, I might have gotten that and set about it with sandpaper - had anything from the 2024 D case appeared anywhere in my area, but I'm pretty sure that entire case just failed to arrive in the UK in any quantity, given how hard it is to find anything much from that batch for sale on eBay, even now.

And the fact they made not one but two rare black ones - the world tour chase, and a Target exclusive 'Red edition' nobody outside America even gets to have a shot at - that really boils my piss. The reason most people know this car is because it was featured in the Bond film Octopussy in 1983 in black, and that's how I most wanted to get it.

I had a black 1:43ish Solido one as a kid and loved it. I made one of the main rival cars in Deliverance: Trans Europe Express a black GTV6 because of this. I tried my level best to get hold of a model of every one of the 27 race entries in the book, and while I knew some wouldn't be doable (Has there ever been a 1:64 model of a Lada VTFS or a TVR 390?) the difficulty of getting hold of an Alfa Romeo GTV6 of any type amazed me. Back then I had money so paying way over the odds for a silver model by Spanish brand Guisval, who I'd never even heard of, was an annoying necessity. It had tatty stickers approximating a race livery which I got annoyed about and took off.

Alongside the inevitable Aston Martins and Lotuses and so on, HW do a number of fairly incidental Bond cars like the Thunderball Mustang or Goldfinger Continental, so it's really not that unreasonable to expect them to make an Octopussy GTV6. Hey-ho, maybe next year.

The Boulevard release is somewhat hopeful. That looks properly great, beautiful and fitting livery with great details, and like any Boulevard, I'm sure it's been widely collected. It would be a shame for this fine casting to sink without trace. If you don't have one, I bet you could find one without much hunting, and you really should, it's cool.

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Cyberpunk Hot Wheels is where I'm going today. I'm not going to gatekeep what cyberpunk is or isn't here, this is not the forum for it and I expect everyone's sick of the discourse by now - I'm talking visual style and broad strokes concepts only.

Recently I featured the Syd Mead-designed Sentinel 400 limo, and while not all of Syd Mead's designs are cyberpunk, in fact I'd argue the majority aren't, this guy designed the movie that basically defined what cyberpunk looks like (Blade Runner, in case you're not following). The Sentinel fits the bill, but as I said in the Sentinel post, it's not seen shops since 2006. But I think in recent years HW have started to really refocus their design to appeal to adults at least as much if not more than they are aimed at kids. So of course, the obvious thing to look at is THE Cyberpunk car: the 1977 Porsche 911 Turbo (930).

If you're not a video game person, you may be scratching your head. The video game Cyberpunk 2077, based on a classic pen-and-paper RPG, features a number of driveable cars the player can acquire, and as an action RPG there are naturally unique special shiny ones, the shiniest of them being the car owned by Johnny Silverhand, the player's kind-of companion (it's complicated). As a rock star, he of course owned a priceless classic, and though a Porsche 930 is not that special now, given the dates this is a 100 year old car at the time the game occurs. It's kitted out with a variety of futuristic sensors and such to make it interconnect with 2077 traffic tech, hence the curious patterns on the bodywork. In reality one of the lead developers was a Porsche fanatic, reportedly crunching developers in order to meet deadlines and overpromising for the lower-end console versions to meet sales targets because he desperately wanted to buy one, and likely the car was shoehorned in for that reason - but the design is superb despite that. Sadly, the 2022 HW release by Dmitriy Shakhmatov, re-released in 2024, is their only car from the game (they should really licence a couple more, car design in CP77 is fab), but it's far from the only Cyberpunk-style HW car .

This take on the 1968 Camaro is a 2023 design by Dwayne Vance that takes the hot rod custom approach HW is known for and turns it to full Mad Max mode (does Mad Max count as cyberpunk? I always saw it as what's going on in the countryside while more traditional cyberpunk is what's happening in the cities). Atypically he did the first livery as well as the sculpting, apparently using motifs from a short story he wrote, though I have no clue where you can read it, I would be very interested to. There's post dedicated to this car on Orange Track Diecast which is worth a look. The 2024 versions of the car, however, were very disappointing generic racing liveries and appeared not to be interested in leveraging the design's stylistic choices at all.

Also by Vance and using the 'screaming skull' visuals are a Track Fleet artic truck, which I don't have, called the Cyberrig, and the above car, the Track Dwagon. This plastic body/metal base car is supposedly inspired by a real Subaru L-series estate customised by Travis Pastrana, which also features flappy downforce-enhancing aero bits. The same skull, kanji characters and diagonal striping motif is present, and this car also has some hangul just behind the front wheels and a graffiti tag-style 'Vance' on the rear quarter. Despite the plastic body these were must-get cars for me, they are really cool built-from-what's-at-hand cars very much in keeping with the cyberpunk ethos. The Track Fleet car has somewhat tempted me at times but not enough to shell out for it (they're expensive in the UK!).

Another design by Vance that exudes a cyberpunk feel of tech meets necessity, the 2021 DAVancenator (man likes naming cars after himself, it seems) makes a feature of blending window and bodywork. I only have this second colour debut one, but later versions used a transparent window/body which rather spoil the effect by defining a windscreen outline, and overall it makes me think of the Lancia Sibilo, a Bertone concept which had a plastic unibody that was simply made transparent where on metal-bodied cars there'd be seams and glass. It also reminds me of Masamune Shirow's windowless vehicles that project a simulated view onto the inside of an armoured hull. That's why I've paired it with Ryu Asada's 2018 Cyber Speeder, a car which has perfectly normal side windows but a fully zamac-obscured forward view, along with glow-in-the-dark wheels and deco elements and a curious rarity for HW: a driver and passenger. This car is more cyber than punk, but leans into it a lot more comprehensively and coherently than a lot of the fantasy designs do.

Another fantasy design that looks like it would work in a cyberpunk setting is the HW K.I.T.T. Concept by Charlie Angulo, and I think Knight Rider as a story is, if not actually cyberpunk, at least cyberpunk-adjacent. Where the 3rd generation Firebird was a wedge car par excellance, this is an amplification of that car's futuristic aura and looks great. The 'shine a light up from under the car' gimmick is less successful, but it's definitely a good original idea on paper.

It's not only the fantasy or semi-fantasy cars that reflect the new enthusiasm HW have for cyberpunk. The 2024 Legends tour winner was this Mazda, a project by Tofu Auto Works of New Zealand that absolutely reeks of the influence of cyberpunk visuals even if the builder Chris Watson didn't explicitly say as much. Speaking as someone with no particular affinity for the MX-5, this is by far my favourite MX-5 I've yet seen.

The reason for the resurgence in interest in cyberpunk is pretty complex. The game was perhaps a major catalyst and gateway, and its metamorphosis from broken disappointment to unignorably redeemed through updates and expansions has kept it in the public eye. Then there's the 30-year rule; while cyberpunk as a genre was around significantly earlier, 1995 was the year that I'd say it really hit the mainstream. Movies from that year:

Ghost In The Shell

Hackers

Strange Days

Johnny Mnemonic

Judge Dredd

The Net

Virtuosity

The City Of Lost Children

Waterworld

12 Monkeys

Batman Forever

And that's just the cyberpunkish ones. Go find a list, it's wild how many great films came out in '95. Then I don't know if you've heard the phrase 'boring dystopia', but prior to Agent Orange becoming the boss of 'Murica, I was hearing it quite a lot as more and more people began to realise how messed up our ordinary lives have gradually been becoming, frog-in-cooking pot style; now we're all learning exactly what the famous curse dressed as a blessing, "may you live in interesting times," means. The ubiquity of bullshit so-called 'AI' and the sheer breakneck speed that it appeared, wowed everyone with its capabilities and evolved from fascinating curiosity through potent tool to blight on the entire internet and job market alike has added fresh, zesty technological angst to the suddenly-not-boring-enough dystopia. In such a socio-political landscape cyberpunk fiction is as natural a fit as watching Outbreak was in 2021 - and guess when that came out? I'm glad HW is at least somewhat staying abreast of this, I just wish they'd embrace it more. Where's the Elysium GT-R? Where's the Judge Dredd '95 Land Rover? Where's the Dodge Turbo Interceptor from The Wraith?

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I had a great idea about Lamborghinis and I wrote a massive screed all about it. It took me several days and a near total rewrite and by the time I was finished I completely doubted my idea and was thoroughly annoyed by it, so that's not happening now. So instead, a briefer post about new Mustangs.

As I understand it, the GTD and Dark Horse are basically the end of petrol-powered Mustangs for Ford, hence the absolute egregiousness of the GTD and its comparably stratospheric price and 'limited edition' of 1000. I do quite like the Dork Hearse, although the GTD less so. The body kit really screws with perceived proportion. It seemed over-tall and its wheels seemed too big, but comparing it to photos, the proportions actually seem right. It's just funny-looking.

The more one reads about it, the more the GTD seems like American Exceptionalism: The Car. GTD immediately suggests diesel power to me, but of course not - It's Grand Touring Daytona, an IMSA class which apparently uses the spec for FIA GT3 racers. So why is it GTD, not GT3? Because even though FIA is a global organisation, IMSA is an American organisation despite the I standing for International, kind of how the baseball World Series is the world according to Americans who don't have passports because the USA is soOo00o big and contains everything they could ever possibly want. For whatever reason (definitely not cultural insecurity or a national inferiority complex) they had to make their own thing that's the same as the other thing, but American.

I'm not really into that spoiler and how it's mounted, or the ludicrous vents round the front wheels. I previously passed on the GTD when I saw it in shops and mostly got it to compare with other Mustangs.

It's as tall as the 2005 Time Attack Custom and the 2018 RTR #25 drift car and as wide at the doors, but the 2018 GT Gulf #19 racer is lower. Nothing earth-shaking there, really.

Now for something really heretical: I can't help wondering what Mustangs would look like now if Ford hadn't decided to do fastback first-gen Mustangs again and then just stuck with that. What if Mustang, but new and original? Or would the Mustang have gone away entirely and we'd be talking about the Probe GTD?

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Can you name a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive rally car that ran in Group B? Yes, the Porsche 911 SC RS, very good. How about for a factory team, though?

Matchbox produced this (rather stained and discoloured, but this was a bargain at £6; have you seen what these in decent condition go for on ebay these days!?) Skoda 130 LR from 1987 to 1989, at a time when this car's Group B career was over due to the demise of the series. The nature of Group B tends to make people forget today that every competitor was a good car (Except the Citroen BX4TC, maybe - that was certainly one of the rally cars ever), but a few were legitimately legendary; their success shouldn't detract from the quality of lower placed cars. The Skoda 130 LR was a valiant attempt by Skoda to build a car that could compete at the top levels of rally, and it ran in Group B in 1984, 1985 and 1986.

The 130 stood for its horsepower, an unimpressive figure seen next to the likes of the Lancia Delta S4's rumoured 800-900, perhaps, but the S4 was a lot heavier than the Skoda, which weighed in at just 720kg. And the comparison with the 911 was not so far off the mark, as the 130 RS of the '70s was a serious circuit contender in its day and sometimes called 'the Porsche of the East'. Skoda engineers had quite a pedigree to call on to help them achieve results.

What they didn't have was the cutting edge tech that made Group B such a bonkers series, though. The Skoda 105 on which the 130LR was originally based had been intended to be a front-engine, front-wheel-drive car, but permission to produce it was denied by Moscow on the grounds that it would have been better than Russian-built cars, which couldn't possibly be permitted. So Skoda had to iterate on their rather outdated rear-engined formula again, and when it came to the racers, they also had to do without 4WD, forced induction, advanced aero, exotic composites or really anything fancier than a very light car with no more than adequate power. That they scored some top ten finishes in the same series as the likes of the Audi quattro S1 and Peugeot 205 T16 was a testament to this rather plain and dumpy car's merits. "Surprising Skoda" indeed.

Skoda in the UK was always an underdog. As a kid, "I bet your dad drives a Skoda!" could only be countered by "Well I bet yours drives a Lada!", so great was public contempt for these eastern-bloc cars. I also had no love for them until 1989, when my mum and I went to Iceland on holiday and spent a week driving across the country from Reykjavik to Akureyri. As a car-mad kid I immediately noticed the difference between British and Icelandic traffic. There were relatively few little hatchbacks and nothing like a sports car, but what there were a lot of fell into a pretty small group of cars: Land Cruisers, Pajeros, Volvos, 4wd Tercels, occasional American 4wds like Blazers and Broncos... and Ladas, and Skodas.

We rented a little white Suzuki SJ413 like the Edocar one seen above; in fact, we rented two, the first of which got us half way across Iceland before dying. We jumpstarted the first, drove back to Reykjavik, exchanged it for another but the second Suzuki died a mile out from the rental place, before we had even left the tarmac. We walked back and got a Lada Niva, which my mum loved, reporting that it felt like driving a tank. Iceland in the summer was gloriously warm and mythically beautiful, but still it defeated two superb Japanese off-roaders with ease, so we could only imagine what it would ask of a car in the winter. My childish ignorance was suitably corrected: no aspersions ought to be cast on eastern bloc cars, the Niva was the AK47 of cars: simple, functional, brutal and phenomenally tough and did its job admirably, and so I expect were Skodas of the time, going by their commonality in Iceland. If the Icelandic drive it, it's tough.

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It's surprising to me more is not made of one of the greatest artist collabs Hot Wheels has ever done: no, not that ludicrous Daniel Arsham 'eroded' stuff or the silly Ornamental Conifer Camaros, I'm talking about Syd Mead (1933-2019).

Anyone whose job title is 'visual futurist' you know is going to be interesting, and he's best known for his work on Blade Runner, but he also worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049, and his wonderful art has influenced many more. He's one of the artists who's shaped what 'futuristic' looks like in everyone's heads, basically. And in 2002 Nathan Proch worked with Mead to sculpt the Sentinel 400 limo from one of Mead's artworks:

Mead drove, and loved, a 1972 Imperial LeBaron, (Imperial was a model, but became to Chrysler as DS has become to Citroen, or as Lexus still is to Toyota, a luxury sub-marque) a huge, black, luxurious cruiser with a giant chrome grille and ridges along its flanks forming vestigial fins front and rear, square and there, looming, arriving like a weather front. Its lines are echoed in the Sentinel 400 to a certain degree, but the Sentinel is a lower slung car entirely, like the LeBaron had a child with a Bertone wedge concept car, retaining the blunt nose but slicking way back into what has to be a miniscule coefficient of drag. I don't particularly go for luxury cars but the Sentinel I make a definite exception for. It epitomises Syd Mead's genius for extrapolating contemporary, extant design cues into the future in flawlessly plausible ways.

The debut of this car was in this glorious dark metallic teal shade with a matte black roof and rear, making it a superb villain's car in my eye, sophisticated, stylish and fundamentally untouchable. But the next widely released version of the car was a complete re-imagining of the car as a police vehicle; I've been on the lookout for one of these that wasn't too damaged or expensive for about 5 years now, and happily it arrived today.

Naturally it says 'POLICE' in large, unfriendly letters, but what really sets the mood with this thing is the other detail. Where other US police cars might be expected to say 'call 911' or 'to serve and protect' or some city motto, this says 'unofficial police business' and 'urbancontrol'. These are mean cops. They aren't here to save you.

I always feel a little cheated by police vehicles that lack a light bar, but not here - it would spoil the lines too much. Alongside the gold and white stripes it looks corporate and privatised, exactly as one might expect dystopian police to look. It's a superbly well-judged livery. Unfortunately, aside from one identical to this but a lighter shade of blue, this was the last well-judged livery, after this there were four releases that were as gaudy and unlovely as you might expect from a early to mid 2000s fantasy Hot Wheels casting, and the car seems to have disappeared after 2006. I wish they'd bring it back, and do more collabs with artists like this; Maciej Kuciara comes to mind immediately.

As usual, I have been unable to resist a little tinkering. As well as indicators and brakelights, the teal one now has period-incorrect aerodisc front wheels that I feel look better than the original 5-spokes and truer to the original artwork, while the police version has more curtly functional black 5-spokes replacing the silver ones it came with.

I have a third, formerly a battered and chipped teal one that I stripped and scrubbed ready to repaint, but never actually got to painting, and in my present situation, sadly it'll remain a work in progress for quite a while, I expect. A look inside reveals that it's actually a six-seater with two rear-facing passengers, a steering yoke rather than a wheel, computer terminals in the back and apparently a killer sound system. It looks quite nice in bare metal but the brushed metal clashes a bit with the chrome and I'd like to give it more shine and some clearcoat if I were to leave it unpainted. Truth to tell, I never decided on a colour. Glossy black is an obvious if unimaginative option, although ivory, bronze or burgundy might suit the car. What colour do you think would look best?