Lola T600 "Alan Mann Racing"
When I was painting the Slot.it Sauber C9 in the Alan Mann Racing livery that you can see in this link, it was clear to me that I was going to decorate another car with the same scheme because I liked it a lot. The combination of red and gold is especially good along with some details of black and white and Alan Mann´s cars were very colorful and easily recognizable. But I also knew that I wanted to make the decoration over a British model.
On the other hand, I was looking for a Slot Racing Company Lola T600, a very interesting model since it was one of the few cars that could be considered as precursors of the legendary sports Group C cars and because of that it has been eclipsed by those cars in great measure.
SRC released some racing kits for that slot car, with the body unassembled, two different chassis and competition material of very good quality, this is an image of the kit with its components disassembled.
Logically I bought one, because it seems to me a very interesting and relatively unknown car and also, being a car of a British builder, I had clear what decoration it was going to have: Alan Mann Racing one. The process is a carbon copy of the process that I followed with the Sauber C9, after a smooth pass with a fine sandpaper to the entire body, I applied a coat of Duplicolor gray primer, once dry another soft pass with the sandpaper to remove imperfections and then I painted it completely with the Tamiya X-12 gold color applied with the airbrush, so the body was like this:
With the paint completely dry, I masked the two longitudinal stripes with 9 mm. wide Tamiya masking tape and painted the body with Tamiya red X-7 acrylic paint. After finishing painting and without waiting for the paint to dry, I removed the masking tape to get the cut between the colors as straight as possible. With this work done the body was like this:
To break the uniformity of the car, I painted the front of the car with white. I will mask the nose of the car leaving only the front "bumper" visible and I painted it with Tamiya X-2 white paint, applied with airbrush like the rest of the previous colors.
After waiting for the complete drying of the bodywork, I placed the few decals that make up the decoration of the car, the numbers and the few sponsors logos, all of them homemade waterslide decals.
The interior of the kit, was limited to a simple lexan tray, as corresponds to a racing slot car, but it was too simple, so I got a full interior of the same car, is not ideal for compete with it, but aesthetically it improves a lot. I painted the rest of the components of the bodywork, headlight shades, rear air intakes, spoiler and rearview mirrors with Tamiya acrylic paint applied with the airbrush and after placing some decals on them I barnished them with automotive lacquer. When they were dry I stuck them to the body.
The amount of photoetched parts that the kit has is impressive, since it contains all those that include standard cars. From my point of view, it is not the best for a racing slot car because the more pieces that form the body, the more possibilities of lost them on the track, but from the point of view of the scale model, undoubtedly improve it exponentially. In the following image you can see all the photo-etched parts that included the kit and that took me a while to place them properly in their place. Especially complicated was placing the two supports of the rear wing, but I got to leave them well.
The kit included two chassis of different hardness, I chose to mount the black one, for an aesthetic question more than anything, because the other one was injected with white plastic and I did not like it that much. The mechanics of the car is very simple with a short-can engine in transverse rear position, aluminum rims, calibrated axels of very good quality, and an excellent guide. The cables are from Avant Slot, very flexible, since the kit did not include them, like the tires, reference 20304 of Avant Slot, the same ones that mount the LMP of that manufacturer.
And once everything was assembled the car looked like this:
As I commented with the Sauber, it is impossible for a car to be ugly with this decoration, as you can see. I recognize that when I started decorating I knew that the result was going to be good, and indeed it has been. Logically, the slot car puts a lot of its part as it is a beautiful model and a high quality and very detailed kit as you have seen, the amount of parts, the photo-etched parts... A slot car very complete, and with a very good mechanics, the mechanical components included are of very good quality and although I didn´t put this particular model on track, I know that its behavior is very good. For my part, I returned to enjoy a decoration that I love, that was basically the intention, but surely won´t do it again for a while, mostly because there are many other very nice decorations to make on our slot cars.
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