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Worlds & Stories
Road icons, racing heritage and the details that make a miniature unmistakable.
Nissan GT-R (R35)
Those wide arches make plenty of noise without the engine running. Underneath, the R35 has a less obvious trick: the engine lives at the front, while the gearbox sits at the rear. I followed that arrangement before getting distracted by the wings again. There is quite a bit going on between the two ends.
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Honda Civic Type R (FK8)
A big wing, busy bumpers, three exhaust tips. The FK8 Civic Type R is not a shy hatchback. I wanted to know which of those conspicuous details actually had work to do. The answer starts with noise—and then gets more interesting at the front wheels.
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Mazda RX-7
Before the widebody kits and enormous wings, Mazda had engineers pinning weight-saving ideas to a board. That is the bit of the FD RX-7 story I keep coming back to. A sports car famous for its unusual engine also depended on lots of people finding small things to remove.
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Mazda MX-5 Miata (ND)
Meet the fourth-generation ND Miata, the car behind these ’15 Hot Wheels models. Two seats, modest power, not much luggage space. Somehow it still generates enough discussion to require a much larger vehicle. I can see why. It looks like a very simple idea, right up until you start finding all the work that went into keeping it that way.
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Toyota GR Supra
Forty-two millimetres. That is the clearance Toyota specified between the manual Supra’s gear knob and the air-conditioning panel. Somewhere in the excitement about getting a clutch pedal, somebody still had to make sure you could change gear without punching the dashboard.
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Ford GT
98, 5, 68. Put these little Fords together and it looks like a grid of race cars. Look again: two are modern road-car tributes, while one represents the GT that won its class at Le Mans in 2016. The numbers send us to different places.
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Jaguar XJ220
A small group of Jaguar people stayed after work and built a supercar. That is a more interesting beginning than a top-speed figure. The XJ220 emerged from the unofficial ‘Saturday Club’, reached a motor-show stand, and then had to become something people could actually buy. The car changed considerably along the way.
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Nissan Skyline R34
Two Bayside Blue R34 GT-Rs, same scale, same maker. Another colour variation? Look at the bonnet. One tiny opening separates the V-Spec II from the V-Spec, and following it took me much further back than Nissan’s parts catalogue.
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Nissan Skyline GT-R (R32)
Twenty-nine races, twenty-nine wins. The R32 GT-R’s Japanese Group A record sounds like the story of one unstoppable racing car. Then I put two blue Calsonic miniatures beside the HKS number 87. Hang on. Which car are we actually talking about?
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Mazda 787B
Three hours left at Le Mans. The leading Mercedes is in trouble, and Mazda’s number 55 moves into first place. The orange-and-green car has a four-rotor engine and a very long afternoon still to finish. I went looking beneath that bodywork and found a story about fuel, moving air intakes and trying to make every combustion count.
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Honda S2000
Honda made the US S2000’s engine bigger for 2004. The headline? Still 240 hp. Well, that doesn’t sound like much happened. Read one row further down the specifications, though, and the update starts to make sense.
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Lamborghini Countach
The first Countach was a yellow show car. Three years later, it was destroyed in a crash test. That is quite a career change. Between Geneva and the road, Lamborghini had to turn a startling shape into something that actually worked—and the body kept changing long after that.
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