INCOMING: HARD-CHARGING 1:43 SCALE CORGI DIECAST LOTUS PERFORMANCE CAR RANGE

With Team Lotus currently standing third in the Formula One Driver’s World Championship, it’s an appropriate time for Corgi to start a collection of Lotus sports and racing cars.

INCOMING: AUTOMODELLISMO 2013 MODEL CAR EVENT THIS SUNDAY, MAY 5

This year marks the 60th anniversary of 'America's sports car’, the Chevrolet Corvette, so the organizers of Automodellismo 2013 have made the tasty sportster star of the show.

BRAWN GP TRIUMPHANT PARADE THROUGH BRACKLEY

Jenson Button was testing tyres in Japan, so we didn't manage to see him yesterday. Even so, Brackley town centre came to a cheerful halt as just about every spare body in the town turned out to cheer on Team Principal Ross Brawn and CEO Nick Fry, plus three open-top buses loaded with smiling members of the Brawn GP race car team.

Strictly speaking this is not a ‘model fan’ video, but we thought you’d enjoy a look even so. Locals I spoke to all reckoned that Ross Brawn is a decent guy, and the team has certainly put this sleepyish market town on the map. After the speeches, the cameras went among the fans to peek at Ross signing some autographs.

Visit Brawn GP here.

Have a look at some F1 diecast models here.

And some Jenson Button stuff here.

JENSON BUTTON AND BRAWN FORMULA ONE TEAM CRUISE THEIR HOME TOWN

The Formula One world champions this year are UK driver Jenson Button and his Brawn GP race car team. Home town for this winning crew is the market town of Brackley, Northamptonshire, where Brawn’s gleaming new high-tech HQ has been rising during the last few months. And after lunch today, Brackley’s main street will host a homecoming parade and presentations from the town’s worthies to its local heroes. The event should be great fun, and if the weather’s good for the calvacade, we’ll be posting a video here ASAP.

However, Brackley is also home to a model fan or two, including ace designer David Bartlett, who has created some superb paper-engineering projects. Among them is a pair of classic F1 racing cars from the early 1990s, Michael Schumacher’s Benetton B192, and Nigel Mansell’s Williams FW14. These are big models - the Benetton is some 600 mm (23.6 in) long, while the Williams measures 450 mm (17.8 in). The FW14 is one that you could build yourself, for David has made it available as a downloadable pdf on his fascinating paper sculptures website.

The pictures above show:
1 Jenson Button powering to victory in his Brawn F1 car.
2 Benetton B192 paper sculpture.
3 Williams FW14 paper sculpture.

Visit David Bartlett’s paper sculptures here.

Visit Brawn GP here.

Have a look at a mouthwatering range of F1 diecast models here.

And there’s a 1:43 Minichamps diecast in the markings of Button’s teammate, Rubens Barichello here.

ASTON-MARTIN TO RACE IN FORMULA 1

There’s winning news for Aston-Martin fans today - the company is planning to enter Formula One (F1) racing from 2012. It’s exciting too for SMN, as Aston-Martin is based at Gaydon, not too far from the SMN workbench, near Oxford, UK.

A-M is already into sportscar racing in a big way, and this will continue, with preparation by top racing outfit Prodrive. In fact, A-M cars will be running in F1 from 2010 under the Prodrive label, before changing to the fully-fledged Aston-Martin F1 name two years later.

For Aston-Martin model fans, there's plenty of choice out there, and one of the nicest diecasts around is the big 1:18 scale Autoart DBR9 in Le Mans racing finish (top picture). It’s a jewel-like production, packed with detail, and just made for display. In 1:43 scale, an attractive James Bond DB5 from the movie Goldfinger (lower pictures) was offered with an Italian partwork that has since included a whole range of well-known and not-so-well-known vehicles from the Bond movies - from a Lotus submarine-car to a Citroen 2CV.

These come up from time to time on eBay, so it’s worth keeping an eye open. Dozens of Bond vehicles have already been released so it’s probably a bit late to subscribe to the whole series.

Details of the Aston-Martin’s F1 ambitions are at Autocar magazine’s website here.

Autoart’s Aston-Martin racers can be viewed here.