Here’s
my rendition of Tamiya’s 1/20 Lotus 99T, as raced by Ayrton Senna and Satoru
Nakajima in the 1987 Formula One World Championship. Senna took two wins in this
car – the Monaco and Detroit races – and also had four second places, and
two third places. Nakajima had a best result of fourth place in the British
Grand Prix. The kit is typical Tamiya – goes together well, and gives a good level of detail. I removed the front and rear wing endplates and replaced them with Studio 27 etched metal ones, which also provided a number of detail parts. As I intended to show the model ‘closed up’, I didn’t add too much detail into the engine bay. Correct ‘Camel’ sponsorship logos came from a Tabu Design decal sheet, and the model was painted with a combination of Tamiya paints and a colour-matched bottle of paint from Zero Paints (which went on really well over the primer).
Zero Paints do a lot of
matching colours for a wide variety of cars, all airbrush ready and easy to use.
If you’re thinking of getting into car modelling then the website www.hiroboy.com
is well worth visiting. Overall I’m pretty pleased with
the end result. It’s never going to win at a model show, but it was a fun and
relaxing build. Now I’m hoping that Fujimi are going to add the 99T’s
predecessor, the 98T, to their growing collection of F1 models – it would look
spectacular to place the bright yellow Camel sponsored car next to the gloss
black JPS version! Vince14
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Photos and text © by Vince
Warrington