Why do "bad" things not come
to good people? The Ford Cosworth RS is one very bad motor car, which
you will never have the misfortune to sample in the U.S. Yes, I realize
that unless you associate Cosworth with CART and Formula 1, your only
probable recall of this name will have the word Vega in front of it!
This is no Vega Cosworth, believe you me.
Although bearing a resemblance to the
1990 Ford Escort (more so the European version), the Cosworth uses the
Sierra’s (Merkur XT4 here) floor pan, four wheel drive system,
and 227 hp Cosworth engine. This is all stuffed into a compact body
adding up to 2800lb and six second 0-60mph times. With flares, 225/45-16
tires and a mega-rear wing, that makes the wing on the current Toyota
Supra Turbo look like someone as proper as Martha Stewart designed it;
this is one aggressive looking car.
How good it is that Le Mans Miniatures
(LMM) makes it available in 1/87th scale, in both street
(painted and unpainted) and rally versions. This review will focus on
the street version as well as the 1993 Portuguese Rally Version (the
’93 and ’94 Monte Carlo Rally cars are also available, with
four massive rally lights mounted in front of the grille).
These excellent, hollow resin kits,
with photo-etched parts are fairly easy to assemble. Be warned that
the instructions are minimal though. They are basically just cartoon
drawings. Taking some time to find reference pictures will pay off huge
dividends, especially when putting decals on the rally car (although
a scale size photo of the completed model is provided).
I have never had to remove flash from
the body or interior of a LMM model. Be sure to have tweezers and a
magnifying lamp though! The painted street version is a better starting
point than the rally one (because of the decals, but more about that
later on) if you’re new to LMM. The detail is superb, though not
quite in the Herpa or Rietze league. This is mainly because, for some
strange reason LMM insists on making realistic, opaque headlight lenses,
that have to be glued in (better not drop one of these, even if you
have a plastic sheet under your working area, unless you’ve trained
a dog to sniff out minute resin parts), but use decals for the rear
lights! I have found this to be true on all of their kits I’ve
built to date. Even more ironic is that they always provide an extra
one piece, glass unit (that needs slight trimming) which is easy to
find and hard to botch, but no extra itty-bitty pieces such as headlights
or mirrors are given! Allow me to qualify the botch reference. If you
use super/crazy glue on the glass unit it will get a haze like appearance.
This is great, if you’re trying to create the idea that the car’s
defogging/defrosting system doesn’t work, otherwise use some other
plastic glue.
The photo-etched parts are easy to apply,
except for the wipers. The problem comes in trying to make a 2-D part
sit in a 3-D way! Bending the wiper to be perpendicular to the arm results
in it breaking off, and then it’s murder to glue back on. The rims
on the street Cosworth scale out to 19 inches. Personally, I think the
Touring Car, ultra big rim with the tire streeeeeetched over it looks
great, so the scale inaccuracy works well here. The rally version has
turned metal wheels, with photo-etched inserts. Awesome looking! The
tough part on the rally version is the many decals that are required
to play "Twister" to conform to all the curves. Divine doses
of patience pay off here.
LMM kits are hard to locate, expensive,
and produced in limited quantities. They have such unique models though,
that a Cosworth RS will be a novel addition to your collection. Their
other models will be conversation pieces, especially if you are a rally,
Viper GTS, or IMS/Le Mans/Group C/GT1 fan.
Wayne Calder |
