Some might say that this post should have come with an “Out of the Slot” heading. There’s an argument to be made for that, but I decided not to do so because-while not related to slot cars-this post is related directly to the environment of my basement toy room, where Drag City Raceway resides. Thus, it qualifies-in my mind at least-as an update on the process of building the environment around the track.
The previous arrangement
One of the projects I’ve been delaying in my basement is moving some things around to make space for a potential expansion of the diorama. This is something I’ve described multiple times, particularly in this post, where I actually drew a map of the plan. It wasn’t too long ago that I was able to move my dad’s old easy chair up to my office upstairs, all part of the effects of The Garage Betrayal. That cleared out that corner, but left my vintage record player still sitting awkwardly on a small end table crossed by a wire shelf.
There is an area in my basement across from the downstairs bathroom and the “Oddly Angled Room” which has never been useful because if it’s size and shape. I wanted to utilize this space for the record player, but I knew that in order to do so, I would have to have a very specific piece of furniture: something that was of reduced depth to fit without eating up all the floor space outside the bathroom, but wide enough to hold the equipment I want it to contain. Ideally, it would be a cabinet with some storage space for records. It seemed like the ideal item for this purpose was what is commonly called a “sideboard” or a “buffet.” Well, this weekend, I went looking for one…and I scored!
Signs of Colorado’s agrarian past can still be found in Longmont
All this is thanks again to my buddy Patrick, who-unlike your HB-has a FaceCrook account, and can access FB Marketplace, which is a better alternative to the now useless Craigslist. He found several candidates on a Saturday morning, but everyone that we contacted said that we wouldn’t be able to come and look at any of the cabinets until Monday. Obviously, that doesn’t work for someone who works on Monday. Fortunately, late that afternoon, a new listing popped up in a town called Longmont, about an hour’s drive north; a town I am familiar with and once spent a good amount of time in, but haven’t been to in many years.
Patrick and I in Ye Olde Chevy Trucke, making our way out of the city.
A few well-placed text messages and a couple of phone calls later, we tossed the dolly and a pair of ratchet straps into the truck and headed up the highway to the old part of Longmont, where we met a soon to be X-patriot selling all her furniture for a planned move overseas. The cabinet was a piece that appears to date from the 1940’s or ‘50s, so post-art deco, but in excellent condition, and looked to be the perfect size and shape for what I needed! I paid the asking price in cash and we loaded it into the truck without much difficulty, thanks again to Patrick’s exemplary skills.
Another 45 minutes to drive back and unload, and we confirmed that I was right: it was the perfect size and shape!
There is no power in this corner of the basement, and we had already explored the possibility of installing an outlet in the wall and determined that due to the structure of the house, doing so was going to present great difficulties, so we figured out a way to run a cord from the AC plug around the corner into a groove on the tile floor to get electricity for the record player and a little bit of additional lighting for the corner (more on that in a moment).
This was an acceptable solution, but it did require a little bit of work to the floor, so we made a quick evening trip to the local Home Depot to pick up a couple of additional supplies, including a small throw rug, which is of a color and style that is aesthetically pleasing, and matches the mood of the area fine, just fine! Once everything was in place, I was so pleased with how it turned out that I decided to spend the rest of the night diving into a long sealed box hidden deep within the bowels of “the Oddly Angled Room!”
The trip to Home Depo also resulted in a new drawer pull: this Celtic knotwork-stye matches the little “angel” pulls of the doors on either side much better than the plain pine knob that was in place when I bought it.
21 years in storage
The contents of this box had not seen the light of day since 2005, when they were packed up and shipped back to Colorado after my brief and failed experiment in Virginia in 2004. Contained within were 2 antique plastic twist-lock containers made for 45 RPM records…both packed to capacity with singles ranging from the late 1950s to the early 90s; country, country rock, garage rock, psychedelia, New Wave, classic rock, all here: records from various periods of my distant past, some going back to my early days in CO, others going all the way back to my pre-teen years in CA…and none of which I had laid eyes on since leaving the East Coast all those years ago!
Though it is just a garden-variety US single pressing, I was thrilled to put my hands on this gem from my childhood for the first time in decades! I can still remember buying this single at Licorice Pizza in Upland!
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of cleaning to be done, especially since some of these records are very worse for wear. I wouldn’t play most of these on my top-notch stereo system upstairs, but records like these are exactly what this old Singer phonograph is for, so I had myself a little record party late into the night, which continued well into Sunday, while sitting at the track running a qualifying round for the upcoming racing season with music on the auto-changer behind me!
If you don’t look too hard you won’t see the cord!
Results so pleasing I could almost dance…kinda…
And God Said: Let There Be (a little more) Light
As a post script, I felt that this newly rejuvenated corner of the basement needed a little bit more lighting, so I took some advice from a friend and hit Etsy, where I ordered one of those cool glass Turkish lamps that are such a hot thing nowadays. I choose a hanging pendant-style with a simple cane handle shape at the top and opted for a bulb style the website amusingly referred to as “Vhite Blue.”
I got that lamp for a very good price, and I think it will suit this corner very well; it should provide not only some additional lighting, but will also cast some interesting patterns on the angled walls of this narrow area. I don’t have this piece yet, but I expect it to arrive in the next couple of weeks, with some assembly required, of course. I’ll be sure to update y’all on the results once this “mood piece” is in place!
A place for everything – the way life should be!
All in all, a productive and successful weekend that improves the dynamics and vibe of the area, and thus leads to more enjoyment at Drag City!
For years now, the way I’ve scored my races at Drag City has been brutally simple: line them up, run them head-to-head, and let the clock decide who lives and who goes back in the case. Single elimination. No appeals. No committee meetings. It’s clean, it’s dramatic, and it has given us some of the finest moments in this little corner of 1980s inland Southern California that exists mostly on plywood and imagination.
But time has a way of whispering in your ear.
After watching the same handful of front-runners pile up heat after heat — and realizing that my fastest cars are also the ones absorbing the most wear — I started to wonder if there might be a better way. Not softer. Not easier. Just smarter. A format that spreads the action around, gives every car a real shot at proving itself, and still builds toward a proper, blood-in-the-water final.
Enter something I’m tentatively calling SNAKE DRAW 32.
The idea is simple in spirit, even if it looks a little more elaborate on paper. Instead of throwing thirty-two cars into a straight ladder and letting the early rounds chew them up, the field is divided into eight balanced heats of four cars each. Every car runs three times. Points are awarded. The strongest rise. The rest go home knowing they actually got to race, not just blink and disappear.
I’m not saying this is the new law of the land at Drag City. Not yet. But for the Spring ’87 Muscle Car tournament, I’m seriously considering giving the Snake Draw a chance to prove itself.
How it works (for 32 cars)
Split 32 into 8 groups of 4.
Each group runs a round-robin (3 races per car).
Points per matchup:
Win = 2, Loss = 0
Tie-breaker = total time across the 3 races
Advance:
Top 1 from each group → 8-car playoff (3 more races for finalists)
Or top 2 → 16-car playoff (4 more races for finalists)
Wear math:
Non-advancers: 3 races
Winner: 6–7 races depending on playoff size
Tracking effort: still easy, because groups of 4 are tiny and you can paste them as blocks.
THE STEPS, IN ORDER….
1) Assign the 32 cars into 8 groups of 4 (balanced “snake seeding”)
Assume cars are ranked 1 (fastest) to 32 (slowest). Use this grouping (it keeps each group balanced: one fast, one upper-mid, one lower-mid, one slow): Group A: 1, 16, 17, 32 Group B: 2, 15, 18, 31 Group C: 3, 14, 19, 30 Group D: 4, 13, 20, 29 Group E: 5, 12, 21, 28 Group F: 6, 11, 22, 27 Group G: 7, 10, 23, 26 Group H: 8, 9, 24, 25
Inside each group, label the cars: A1, A2, A3, A4 (same for B, C…H)
Example for Group A: A1 = seed 1 A2 = seed 16 A3 = seed 17 A4 = seed 32
2) The 6-race schedule for EACH group (round-robin) Run these six matchups in this exact order for every group: Group B is the same pattern, etc.
Result: each car runs 3 races, against the other three cars once.
3) Lane assignment that’s fair and automatic (no extra races)
To avoid one car always getting the “good lane,” just do this: In each matchup, the first car listed starts in Lane 1. The second car listed starts in Lane 2. Because of the schedule, each car ends up in Lane 1 about as often as Lane 2 over the 3 races.
4) Scoring (simple)
For each head-to-head: Win = 2 points Loss = 0 points (Optional) DNF = 0 points and record the time as blank Rank within the group by: Total points Total time across the 3 races (lower is better) Fastest single run (if you need a final tie-break)
Advance either: Top 1 from each group → 8-car playoff or Top 2 from each group → 16-car playoff
5) “Master Run List” (keeps it fun and spreads wear/heat) Total = 48 races to complete the group stage (8 groups × 6 races).
If Snake Draw 32 works the way I think it might, it won’t replace the old way out of sentimentality or novelty — it’ll earn its place the same way any car earns a reputation at Drag City: by surviving the laps. This isn’t about softening the edges or manufacturing parity. It’s about balance. About giving every machine three honest shots under the lights before the knives come out in the playoffs. If the format proves fair, exciting, and worthy of the name, it stays. If not, we go back to the ladder and nobody speaks of this again. That’s racing.
My name is Roxy Calder. I started writing things down because I noticed how quickly this town forgets. By Monday, the crashes are rumors. By Friday, they’re legends. Somewhere in between, the real story disappears. Call it Drag City Confidential, call it self-preservation — I don’t mind. I just don’t like loose ends.
Static rides the coming storm…
This town can be loud all day — roaring engines, radios, jukeboxes, gossip — and then, after midnight, it turns that volume down like it’s hiding something. That’s when the old names start circling again: Whitcomb’s Emporium. The Back Room. The Sinisters. And if you’ve lived here long enough — if you’ve driven Bear Valley Road at the wrong hour with the heater blasting and the dial hunting for anything but your own thoughts — you’ve heard the rumor that refuses to die: a pirate station that shows up maybe once a year, plays music that was never released, and vanishes before you can prove you weren’t imagining it.
First Confirmed Hit
Nobody “discovers” Wardglenn’s pirate station on purpose. You don’t tune in like it’s a ballgame and tell your buddies to hurry into the room to catch it. It’s the opposite of that. It’s something you catch by accident, when your guard is down and the night is doing what Wardglenn nights do — thinning out, shadows getting long, making every familiar streetlight feel like a question.
The earliest report I can pin down with a date — and with something more solid than bar talk — comes from a guy named Lenny Vargas, who used to work nights over by the supermarket loading dock. Not a mystic. Not a scene kid. Just a normal, tired man with nicotine on his fingers and grease in the creases of his hands, sitting in his car on a late break because it was the only place he could be alone without somebody needing something from him. The car matters, too: a sun-faded ’71 Plymouth Barracuda Gran Coupe, a brown 318 car — exactly the kind of used muscle-era hand-me-down a grocery store guy could afford in the mid-’80s, especially in a town where racing was practically a second religion. And tucked into that dash was one of those strange Chrysler-Plymouth options that feels like it was invented for a night like this — a stereo cassette tape system with the ability to record right off the radio, plus an available microphone for dictation. (xr793.com)
Your intrepid reporter in the grandstands at the end of a day of qualifying at the track.
Lenny wasn’t a Sinisters fan, but he knew of them the way everybody in Wardglenn knew of them — as local trouble with guitars, the band your cousin swore he saw at a backyard party, the name you heard attached to fights, broken hearts, and one too-many stories that always ended the same way: and then they were gone. So when he told me he was half-listening to the radio at that hour — not for music, just for proof that the world was still running — I believed him.
He was scanning the AM band when the static… changed. Not “got stronger.” Not “faded in.” Changed — like somebody turned a corner in the dark and suddenly you can hear their footsteps on a different surface. The hiss pulled back, the frequency locked, and for maybe ten seconds the signal was clean enough that Lenny thought he’d stumbled onto a small town station from out past the desert.
Then a guitar snapped in — sharp, trashy, bright as chrome — and right on its heels came a voice that didn’t sound like a DJ at all. It sounded like the edge of a stage: half-mic’d, half-shouted, the kind of voice that doesn’t “host” so much as announce.
And it said, clear enough to carve into memory:
“KEEP YOUR ENGINE RUNNING.”
The song hit immediately after — fast, feral, upright-bass thump under the guitar, the whole thing riding that psychobilly gallop like it was trying to outrun its own shadow. Lenny couldn’t have told you the title. He couldn’t have quoted a verse. But he told me one thing with absolute certainty: it sounded like Wardglenn. Like grease and desert air and trouble pretending to be music.
He reached for the cassette unit and hit RECORD — not because he had a plan, but because the moment gave him no choice. The tape started turning. Sixty-three seconds of hiss, a burst of that song, and then — right in the middle of it — a low, steady tone that swallows everything like a hand over your mouth.
That’s Exhibit A in this file.
You can hear the moment Lenny realizes it’s happening. His breathing changes. He laughs once, under his breath, the way people laugh when they’re not sure if they’re about to be embarrassed or scared. Then, just as fast as it came in, the station is gone. Nothing dramatic. No big final scream. Just a slip back into static, like the dial closes up behind it and pretends it was never open.
A bumper sticker from a popular LA-era radio station of the time…but it was just a name! What happened in Wardglenn was the real thing….
Lenny kept the tape for years without playing it much. “Felt like bad luck,” he told me. “Like checking to see if something dead is still dead.” He finally handed it over after the Sinisters story ran — after enough people started talking again, and the old rumor found fresh oxygen. He didn’t want his name in print. He didn’t want to be the guy who “believes in ghost radio.” He just wanted one thing written down plainly:
It happened. He recorded it. And whatever that station is… it knew exactly what it was doing.
Exhibit B: Lenny’s Dial Log
After the station vanished back into static, Lenny did something that doesn’t feel dramatic until you realize how few people do it: he wrote down what he could remember before his brain could sand the edges off. It wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t a diary. It was a grease-smudged scrap of paper folded into his wallet like a receipt — the kind of thing you forget you’re carrying until years later, when you find it and your stomach drops.
Exhibit B is that scrap. A dial log, four lines long:
a rough time stamp
a location note (“dock / west lot”)
a frequency guess on the high end of AM
and the phrase, written in block letters like he didn’t trust himself to remember it later: KEEP YOUR ENGINE RUNNING
When I finally got the scrap into my hands, I did what Wardglenn has trained me to do: I made copies, I put the original somewhere safe, and I started looking for repeats.
Not proof. Repeats. Because one witness is a story. Two is coincidence. Three is a pattern. And patterns are the closest thing this town ever gives you to truth.
The Once-a-Year Rule
Here’s the part that always makes people lean back and squint like I’m trying to sell them something: the station doesn’t show up every night. It doesn’t show up every month. It doesn’t even show up every year the way the first cold morning does.
It’s rarer than that.
The best I can tell — based on what I can actually corroborate, not what people swear they “remember” after a few drinks — Wardglenn’s pirate broadcast hits about once a year, sometimes missing a year, sometimes coming back twice in the same season like it’s making up for lost time. The window is narrow: late summer into early fall, the stretch of nights when the heat finally loosens its grip but the town hasn’t fully exhaled yet. The hour is usually the same, too — not midnight, not 3 a.m., but that strange in-between time when you’re either going home or you’re realizing you never really left.
And it shows up where Wardglenn keeps its secrets parked:
industrial edges
service roads
empty lots behind familiar businesses
the kind of places nobody admits to spending time unless they have to
That’s the pattern. That’s what makes it feel less like “some guy with a transmitter” and more like a glitch that opens only when the conditions are right — weather, mood, atmosphere, whatever you want to call the invisible stuff that makes a town feel haunted even when it’s wide awake.
3 More Witnesses
I needed two more people who didn’t know each other, didn’t share the same rumor pipeline, and had no reason to inflate the story. I found them. One came with a second artifact. The other came with a detail I wish I could un-hear.
Witness #2: Marisol “Mari” Vega, Wardglenn General Night Orderly
Mari worked nights at the hospital in the mid-’80s, the kind of person who stays calm when everyone else is panicking because panic is a luxury you can’t afford in an emergency hallway. Her story wasn’t “I heard a spooky station.” It was almost annoyingly practical.
She was sitting in her Celica ST on a break, parked where you park when you don’t want to be seen from the main entrance. Radio low. Lights off. Just trying to keep her head together before going back in.
Then the station cut in.
Not gradually. Not fading. Cutting — like a switch thrown.
She didn’t know The Sinisters personally, but she’d heard the name. Everybody had. She remembered two things with crystalline clarity:
The sound was wrong for radio. Too close. Too room-like. Like the microphone was hearing air move around it.
Between songs, a voice read something flat and reluctant, like a man forced to say it. The only line she caught clean was the same one Lenny wrote down years earlier:
“KEEP YOUR ENGINE RUNNING.”
She didn’t record it. She didn’t have the option. She just sat very still until it went away, then went back inside and didn’t tell anyone because, in her words, “I already had enough nightmares.”
Witness #3: Cal Rourke, Tow-Truck Driver
Cal had the kind of job that teaches you not to believe anybody’s version of events, including your own. He didn’t come to me because he believed the legend. He came to me because he recognized a detail in the Sinisters write-up and it bothered him.
He swore he heard the broadcast out by a service road on the Whitcomb’s side of town on a night he was waiting on a call. He had a cheap portable radio in the cab because the truck’s unit was acting up. The station came in rough, but there was one moment of clarity — a line delivered like a stage tag. A phrase that meant nothing to him until he saw it in print.
KEEP YOUR ENGINE RUNNING.
Cal didn’t have a tape. But he had something I didn’t expect: he’d scribbled down the frequency on the back of a work order because he planned to tell a buddy who was into radios.
That scribble matched Lenny’s dial log closely enough to make my pulse pick up.
Not exact. Close. The kind of close you get when you’re dealing with something that doesn’t behave like a normal station — something that drifts, slips, refuses to sit still on a clean number the way legitimate broadcasts do.
Now we’re not talking about one guy in one car on one night.
Now we’re talking about a repeat.
The FULL Record – Witness #4: Mike Herrera, High School Student
Mike Herrera was sixteen that fall. He wasn’t chasing pirate radio. He was chasing songs — the kind you waited up for, finger hovering over the RECORD button, praying the DJ wouldn’t talk over the intro. His stereo was wired into a secondhand boom box so he could get a clean copy straight off the FM band. He had the routine down. Level check. Pause engaged. Timing dialed in.
At 12:14 a.m., the signal bent.
Mike swears he didn’t touch the tuner. Swears he didn’t bump the antenna. The station he’d been taping — some safe, corporate rock block — thinned out like it had inhaled too sharply. Then something else slid underneath it. Not static. Not interference. Something deliberate.
A guitar line that sounded familiar in structure but wrong in tone. Darker. Slower. As if the chords had been tuned down half a step and left out overnight in desert air.
Then: the voice…If you’ve heard The Sinisters, you’d recognize the timbre immediately — that smooth restraint, that way the vowels flatten at the end of a line. But this wasn’t any track anyone could place. Not on the EP. Not on the bootlegs. Not on the live tapes that circulate quietly between collectors who pretend they don’t collect.
Mike didn’t stop the tape. That’s why his copy runs the full 3-minute length and includes an entire song that, quite possibly, had never been heard until the night be captured it…or at least, not by anything human.
No DJ interruption. No station ID. No collapse into hiss. Just a clean, deliberate fade — like whoever was transmitting knew exactly how long the song was supposed to last. And then, without warning, the regular station snapped back in mid-sentence. Same DJ. Same song rotation. Like nothing had happened.
Mike labeled the cassette in block letters: 11/2 – 12:14 AM
He played it for two friends the next day. One said it sounded like The Sinisters. The other said it sounded like someone pretending to be them.
Mike stopped playing it after that. He says the second verse feels wrong. Not musically. Structurally. Like it doesn’t belong on any album because it wasn’t written to belong anywhere.
The Herrera recording: a complete song that sounds like The Sinisters but matches no known recording by that band. cleaned of hiss years later, this is the best evidence on tape of Wardglenn Pirate Radio
Exhibit C: The Thing Under the Tape
I’ve listened to Lenny’s sixty-three seconds more times than I want to admit. Not obsessively — carefully. On different equipment. At different volumes. Through headphones. Through speakers. In daylight and in the wrong kind of midnight.
Most of it is what you’d expect: hiss, a burst of music, the shift when the signal collapses. But buried in the middle — under the guitar, under the noise — there’s a low tone that arrives like a pressure change. You can feel it more than you hear it. It doesn’t sound like a transmission artifact. It sounds like a deliberate marker… except it doesn’t behave like a normal test tone. It swells. It chews up the music. It’s almost physical.
And right at the edge of that tone — right where your brain wants to give up and label it “static” — there is something else. A human shape in the noise. Not a sentence I can quote without lying. But a cadence. A breath. Someone speaking too close to a microphone, then stopping abruptly as if they heard something in the room with them.
If that voice is real — if it’s not just your mind trying to find faces in clouds — then this wasn’t a broadcast meant for the public. It was something else bleeding through.
Known / Unknown / Next Lead
KNOWN: A station cuts into the AM dial in Wardglenn roughly once a year, in a narrow seasonal window, late at night. More than one person has heard it. Two separate scribbles — from two separate lives — land on roughly the same frequency range. Two recordings exist, captured because the right people were in the right place at the right time with the right equipment.
UNKNOWN: Who is transmitting. Where they’re transmitting from. Why the signal behaves the way it does — drifting, arriving suddenly, vanishing cleanly. Whether the music is truly Sinisters material from the lost Sinister Rhythm sessions… or something meant to sound like it. And what, exactly, is happening under that recording — the tone, the voice-shape, the sensation of a room you can’t see.
NEXT LEAD: The frequency range is consistent enough to hunt. The places are consistent enough to triangulate. And the names that keep circling this story — Whitcomb’s Emporium, the service roads, the edges of town where you park when you don’t want to be found — are starting to overlap in ways I don’t like.
Next time the air goes thin and Wardglenn turns the volume down like it’s hiding something, I’m not going to be listening alone.
The “beard brigade” at work on the real thing: your HB with my ragtag crew of schemers
On this sunny winter Sunday, while a couple of my partners in crime try to figure out what ails one of our Hoopties in my front yard, I’m taking you to the basement on another 1:43 scale detour. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on this topic, you know that I’m not a big collector of 1:43 scale, but I have obtained a few of them because some are just too cool to pass up!
For the most part, I have stuck with the vaunted British brands, Dinky and Corgi, because they are the best. But sometimes it’s good to remember that, despite their familiarity to North American audiences, the British-made models were not the only game in town; at 1:43 there were several other players that I’m slowly getting more interested in, giving me yet another way to spend money!
Today’s post focuses on a disparate mashup of recent purchases in this scale, all of which have an Italian connection in one way or another…
Grifos Galore!
I am a big fan of Iso cars. Have been ever since the excellent Matchbox model of the Iso Grifo, my favorite car in my childhood, gave me the bug. For years I’ve known about the most common 1:43 scale version of the Grifo, that made by Corgi…and for years, I’ve refrained from buying it because I’ve been searching for the one with the ”clover” pattern wheel variant, which I think is a lot better looking than the 8-dot “pepper pot” -style wheels, but in years of searching I’ve only ever found two or three of them for sale and they’ve always been extremely expensive because, let’s face it, they’re rare and collectors want them. Recently I came across this decent example of the common issue for a very low price, so I decided, what the hell…and grabbed it.
What puzzles me about this Corgi model is why they elected to make it so similar in so many ways to the Matchbox 1:64 which was still in production at the time: a nearly identical color, ivory interior which was very common on Matchboxes of the day, and right hand steering as if the car were made for the British market, are all similar to the series #14 Lesney OG. It makes you wonder why they chose a medium metallic blue; why not silver or orange or yellow or something just…different from what Lesney was doing?
The famous 1:64 Matchbox with the 1:43 Corgi: definitely boids of a feather!
What does differ is that the Corgi model is of the rare “7 Litri” Grifo, the 427 big block model, which may have been the fastest road car of its day. The silver stripe spanning the B pillars across the roof tells you that, even though the tail cove is not offset in black. Under the opening hood-which features the raised section to clear the air cleaner-is the Detroit “iron lump” that made the Grifo one of the coolest Italian GT cars in all history.
Overall, this is a good, well-proportioned model with nice detailing and the signature diamond headlights so preferred by the British manufacturers of the day. My only regret is that this car was made only during the “Whizzwheels” era (now there’s a name that hasn’t aged well!), and thus lacks the 2-piece metal hub/rubber tire combo that made the early Corgi models so appealing
No denying it looks good in blue! The real thang: the Grifo Series 1 7-Litre: one of the most beautiful GT cars of all time!
But wait, there’s more! It was months ago during a previous Tipping the Scales post that I promised you a little more detail on one of these, and I’m only just now getting around to it! Here you see a pair of Italian-made models of this famous Italian car:
These are early variations of the Politoys rendering of the Grifo. This car was made in a total of five colors throughout its production life, and the two you see here, the dark metallic red and the bright orange red, are the most popular. There was also a silver model, which I feel is the most attractive and, while it is not here at the time of this writing, I have purchased one of those…which I hope is on its way to me!
Purchased and allegedly on the way from France…the Politoys Grifo in silver
Unfortunately, due to these models’ European origins they tend to be rather hard to find in the US, so that silver model I just bought is coming from a seller in France. Now, I don’t mind telling you that over the past couple of years I’ve had some bad experiences buying from overseas sellers, so at this point, I’m not counting chickens before they’re hatched; I’m not sure I’ll ever actually see this model. Fortunately, with the site I used and the method of payment I chose, I should be able to get a refund if it never shows up…so time will tell!
There are two much more rare variations of the Politoys model: one in orange and another in bright blue. Both of these are very hard to find. As an interesting postscript, this model carried into the later Polistil era with cheapened one-piece wheels, and can commonly be found as one of the Soviet-made copies, which have the ugly wheels of the later Italian-made cars combined with cheap plastic baseplates. My only interest is in the original Politoys models, again with the attractive, metal hub/rubber tire wheel set up and the metal base: this is a nicely made model which is remarkably heavy; the heft and detail make it an appealing collectible.
The 1st “Lambo”
Staying with Politoys but leaving Iso, we come to my most recent 1:43 purchase, which is really worth bragging about: this superb copy of the Lamborghini 350 GT.
The timing is interesting because my last Modelo En Bofus post about the Lamborghini Miura lamented that most of Lamborghini’s early cars have been neglected by scale modelers. While we still don’t have a 1:64 scale model of the 350 or 400GT, which I feel we should, this excellent model of the 350 was a must own!
Lamborghini 350GT: the real thang…what a great color combo!
Made in an attractive steel blue with pumpkin interior, and featuring all four opening ports including a detailed V-12 engine under the hood, I was thrilled to get this car for the price I paid for it. It’s not in mint condition: the hood doesn’t close properly and there are a couple of minor paint nicks here and there, but for the price I gave for it I can’t complain. It’s a really beautiful model from top to bottom, and seeing this has definitely driven my interest in this brand up a notch!
Despite the “Redneck tech” toothpick prop-rod added by your HB, this Politoys version of the 1st production Lamborghini is a very appealing model!
Other European Players
(the following pics grabbed from the web)
The Ediltoys model of the Grifo is rare and sells for many hundreds of dollars in top condition
There are several other European brands in the 1:43 scale that I’ve been aware of most of my life, but never collected. I have a handful of French-made Norev “Jet Cars” I bought at Kay Bee Toys during the brief period in the mid-1980s when they were carrying them. I have a few instances here and there of Solido models (also France), but the generally high prices on the vintage originals have kept me from buying more than a just a handful of them. A couple of other brands that I have not a single copy from include Mercury, Mebetoys, and Ediltoys, all of which are Italian, but again, the price is for admission for these can be very high.
A mint example of the Solido Aston Martin DB4: the model dating from the era of the real car
Now, since you are reading this, you must be a die-cast collector yourself, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know! Just giving my perspective and experience on it.
This is one I am actively looking for: the Mebetoys model of the uber-rare Iso Fidia S4
All of these brands either went out of business or cheapened their products dramatically as the economic stressors of the ‘70s arrived, so IMHO it is only the models from the golden era of the ‘60s and back that are worth having. Since I’m not a serious 1:43 collector, it’s unlikely I’m never going to pay extremely high premiums to own any of these cars; I would rather spend that $ on Thunderjets! Yet, bargains can be found, especially on examples like these here that are somewhat play-worn and in less than perfect condition; when I find those bargains, I’ll probably jump on them if the “petty cash pool” allows. And if I come across any more interesting 1:43 finds, I’ll make sure to share them with you here! After all, my bear family needs toys to play with!
Happy Saturday, dear readers! And it is happy indeed, because for the first time in what seems like ages, your humble blogger has a weekend day entirely to hisself, free and clear! What better opportunity to head down to the toy room, the happy place in the basement, and spend some quality time at Drag City Raceway!
This beautifully detailed Hot Wheels “Elite 64” ’75 BMW gets an up-front place of honor at the track
Thanks mainly to the awesome skills of my cub The Hot Wheels Hunter, the last year and a half I have added hundreds upon hundreds of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars to my die-cast collection. I have amassed such a huge stockpile of cool, newer, die-casts that my hand has been essentially forced into another round of diorama changes.
A high-detailed HW “Car Culture” Toyota 2000GT, complete with Japan-spec fender mirrors, also appears up front in the “next run” hold pen. Close examination with the camera shows a slight deformity to the front end around the right-side driving light, something I did not notice in the package at the store but, now that I see it, I kind of like the way it gives the car the look of having sustained slight damage on the track while also creating an aggressive “snarling dog” countenance
This round represents the biggest changes that I’ve made in a while, with several new cars being introduced to the layout and others moving around or being re-positioned to new areas, adding some realism by enforcing the idea that these are snapshots of a living, dynamic world where the cars don’t just sit still indefinitely, but migrate from place to place.
Beautiful Hot Wheels “Silver Series” ’70 Poncho GTO in the parking lot
In addition to the cars, I’ve also added some more peeps, as the last year has seen me add several more multi-packs of American Diorama die-cast figures to my collection as well, all of which have been stacking up and waiting to stretch their legs. Now, a few lucky figgys are getting the chance to make the scene!
What you may notice about the figures is that I’m trying to utilize clay as a base more often than the glue or tape I’ve used in the past, because the clay is easily removed and replaced, allowing the figs to be easily re-positioned…a luxury the glue does not afford! I haven’t decided for sure yet if I like the results better or not yet, so here’s your chance to tell me what you think!
The hardest part was deciding what to remove from the layout, but the second hardest part was picking which ones to add, since I had so many awesome candidates that it’s taken me months to decide what should get the honor of being displayed!
A completely new addition: this Datsun 4×4 joins the Greenlight Toyota, Johnny Lightning Jeep, and another HW Premium Dodge Power Wagon on the water tower mound, giving us a lifted truck on all 4 compass points on this elevated hill, a special place open only to automotive journalists and professional photographers and cameramen.
One of these cars, a very special and unique one, is displayed where there was no car before it, making it a new tableau on the scene.
This super-cool HW Treasure Hunt “The Chevrolator” is a new addition, displayed as a vintage “point of interest” at the Chevrolet kiosk in the infield, where hopeful sales-types hope to take orders for new Corvettes and CamarosAnd behind the Ford Kiosk, what was a black ’65 Galaxie racer has been updated to a late ’80s T-Bird Pro-Stocker in an insanely “period” color scheme!
As for the others, take a look at the new additions and the new looks and tell me what you think: were these good choices, or would you have chosen to pull something else off my dining room table?
Just about my favorite purchase of the last several months: this matte black Austin Healy hot rod with it’s blown V8 and red and white stripes and scallops is Anglo-American Rockabilly perfection! It gets a prominent space in the racer’s paddock next to a silver Alfa Romeo GTV coupe, also a new addition!
New spectators, new competitors, and new action! Its always MORE & FASTER at Drag City!
