"Nickey Chevrolet" McLaren Mk2 by Mike Sells

The body is by Strombecker and is rather scarce and expensive today, especially with an unbroken windscreen. I've never found another one I could afford. "Road & Tack" magazine did a road test of this car in 1967 which proved it to be the quickest, fastest car they had tested to that time. The excellent color photo of the engine room on the cover and several black and white photos in the article were necessities in building this model accurately. The chassis and cockpit are simple sheet styrene constructions: there is no suspension detailing. 4 spoke wheels are from the Matchbox Surtees kit and tires are resin castings of the Monogram Lotus 33 units widened to suit the McLaren. The exposed engine is made by scratchbuilding a cross ram manifold from styrene rod and sheet fitted with the Weber sidedrafts from the Fujimi 1/24 scale tool kit. This project languished on the shelf for some years because I couldn't get the markings right. I tried hand lettering and creating decals on CADD but nothing worked well enough. Finally, color copier decal film became available and I bought a set of 1/24 scale decals from Fred Cady Designs. This was the first model finished using the techniques described in the ROHR Porsche GT1 how-to. Several sets of stripes were used to create the markings to suit this particular body. I recently purchased a pretty good vac-formed version of the same body from Electric Dreams (see their website) and they may have more. Bruce McLaren's works racer carried a much simpler red with white numbers color scheme.