Vanguards 1/43 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

The Ford Sierra RS Cosworth was first presented to the public at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1985, with plans to release it for sale in September and closing production of the 5,000 cars in the summer of 1986.

In practice, it was launched in July 1986 and 5545 were manufactured in total of which 500 were sent to Tickford for conversion to the Sierra 3 door RS500 Cosworth. The vehicle was manufactured in RHD (Right Hand Drive Only).

I see this model as the spiritual successor to the Matchbox SuperKings version that was also produced in white. My copy - for some reason - had a massive dent in the front grille, which really annoyed me - methinks my mother had summat to do with it - I'll never know.

It is a fairly decent effort - everything is in the right place, and the tampo-ing at the rear is well done.

What surprises me is that Hornby/Corgi have not released a RS500 version yet - this surely is an iconic Fast Ford that is worthy of re-creation. For some reason this model has not found a place in The Garage, not sure why......

Hot Wheels Ferrari FF

The eternal question is "why"?

Why is there an exclusive deal with Hot Wheels to have Ferrari's in all scales to the detriment of Matchbox?

This is something I don't understand from Mattel one bit. What harm is there in giving Matchbox a Ferrari casting - after all, it all started off with MB75 Ferrari Berlinetta from the Lesney era.....so why not continue?

FF meaning "Ferrari Four", for four seats and four-wheel drive) is a grand tourer presented by Ferrari on March 1, 2011 at the Geneva Motor Show. It is Ferrari's first production four-wheel drive model. The body style has been described as a shooting-brake, a type of sporting station wagon/estate car with two doors. It replaced the 612 Scaglietti grand tourer. The FF has a top speed of 335 km/h (208 mph) and it accelerates from zero to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 3.7 seconds.

Problem I have is this. Although I enjoy this casting, the lack of detailing shits me a tad. How hard would it be to add some red light detail to the rump of the model? No doubt there will be detailers like Eric Loon (mad Malaysian guy, whose blog I follow - love his way of expressing his thoughts in English!) who will no doubt add this to the model, but I cannot help thinking that whilst the casting is good, I feel a little short changed.

Am I expecting too much from the price point? Possibly. But then so much of the diecast budget from Mattel is directed to Hot Wheels, rather than Matchbox, I expect a little more. You only have to look at the Matchbox Holden VE Ute SSV in terms of detail - it can be done......