GP4: 1996 Jordan 196 walkaround part 1

Next up in my walkaround series is the 1996 Jordan 196 Peugeot, which is one of my all time favourite cars. It's a very clean shape and has a bold gold livery (though my screenshots has the more mustard colour from the early season). Does anyone remember the pre-season testing livery with the green and white? I thought it looked good in that too. Anyway, as we get into some of the detail, there are lots of places of interest too.

As usual, you can read my model blog for comparison: Model Review. I wasn't particularly happy with any of the Jordan models, and that's because I spent a long time working on my own version, albeit in 3D.

I'm not sure who mapped the car, but Celinho did the original livery, and Quickslick and Kedy provided season specific updates I believe. There are a few little mapping issues, but overall I think we did the car justice, so thank you to all who contributed on this one.

Again, I post my plan views before going into the 3D views. Before I started creating cars for 1996, I actually did not use pictures as blueprints, preferring to do things by eye. However I had converted to starting shapes with pictures, but you have to be careful with perspective and if the shot is not quite straight, you may have to tweak the photos before you use them as a blueprint. I have, in the past, merged various photos together, so maybe a side shot without the wheel on. Anyway the reason I used them was to give an additional reference that my proportions were good in as many angles as possible.

This Jordan was the first car where I went all out on detail, both on outside the car and inside the car. As I came back to do this blog, I surprised myself with how much detail I went into in parts, so I can't wait to show you some of that. 

The car has a William-esque nose and monocoque section, very slim and nicely moulded. The continued with a Ferrari 640/61 style sidepod which they adopted for the 1995 car. They added a second inlet in a more conventional position. How this all smoothly integrates with the rest of the car is very beautifully done. Like Williams, they had a very low side-head protection, a new regulation for the year, and teams that had high ones were stuck with it for the season.

Moving towards the rear of the car and there is the rear sidepod cooling vane, which I think I created a cover for as an alternative at different GPs. Like most teams, the endplates extend past the rear wheels to a winglet just in front of the rear wheels, and again I quite like the curves that make it a bit more beautiful. Underneath that winglet, there is a large black vane emanating from the floor. McLaren had a small one on the MP4/9, but it's a solution that comes and goes, with them being a bit more popular in the mid-2000s. The central diffuser part is fascinating, but we'll get into that later on. They sometimes ran an extra third element on their lower rear wing, it wasn't there for all races.

As usual, the walkarounds are split into parts, parts 2 and 3 coming soon. Here is my car in rfactor 2 in the meantime.