Whilst searching for pictures of Gordinis last year, I stumbled across this.

Below is what Simca's marketing men wanted the car to be:

It was launched in 1954 soon after Simca bought the Ford France operation: a Ford design, it was fitted with a Ford flathead V8. In 1959 Simca started to manufacture the car in Brasil under the name Simca Rallye, and the locals raced it until the mid 60s.

What I like, is that the Brasilians transformed it from a very boring middle class car to a rather wild dirt track racer

As I had an old Minialuxe Simca Trianon in 1/32nd, I decided that I would build a model of it for this year's Bordeaux race, instead of the Peugeot 403 I had originally planned to do.

Alas I just could not find out enough about the sponsors, and I had abondon the idea of making car #35.

 

 

After a lot of searching, I decided to do the black car in the background of this picture instead, because all the sponsor names are hand written.

 

Here is the part build car togeher with the scratch-built interior.

Below is the fiddly bit, drilling through every single hole to make the nose look better.

 

 

Here is the very nearly finished car, the motor is from Atlas using a modified Atlas chassis, it handles fine, but it has no brakes! Anybody out there knows why????? Please let me know. (Use the link on the home page)

Having tried for over a week, I have finally managed to do whitewall on the tyres, and they look quite good

I had to use a little poetic licence with the sponsors, they are all genuine but the front and rear ones come from other Brasilian Simcas of the period.