1/43 Model Review: 1999 Minardi M01 Ford

Background

Minardi wanted to signify a new era for the team with the new chassis numbering, the M01. Luca Badoer returns to the team, having previously driven for them in 1995, and was joined by Ferrari test driver, Marc Gene in his rookie season.

The car remained near the rear of the grid, frequently battling with the Arrows team. Badoer damaged his wrist at a test session crash and was replaced for one race by Stephane Sarrazin but span out of the race.

At the European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring, Badoer was running in fourth place in his Minardi when his gearbox failed with 13 laps to go and the Italian reduced to tears at the side of his car. But teammate Gene secured sixth place to secure Minardi's first point for four years.

The team equaled Arrows' points haul at the end of the year, but lost out on countback meaning they finished 10th in the Constructors' Championship, one place ahead of the more competitive and better funded debutantes, BAR. I still find it funny that BAR said they could win and didn't score a point when Minardi did!

This car was the first Formula 1 car that Fernando Alonso drove before joining the team in 2001.

Minichamps 

Minichamps 430990021

Minichamps 430990020

 For some reason, Minichamps didn't have the rights for Luca Badoer's name on the cardboard inlay, but they were able to reproduce his helmet with no issues. I wasn't particularly keen on the silver liveries that Minardi went for in 1998 and 1999, I much prefer the yellow black and white of the 1997 car or the yellow on their 2000 car. To the model itself and it's another pretty accurate model from Minichamps, I like how they have added the extra padding on the headrest behind the drivers helmet. Not much to complain about on this car.
Score: 7/10

Tameo

Tameo TMK283

This is based on Marc Gene's point scoring car at the European GP. I hadn't notice before that they changed the nose on this car mid-season, it was a lot shorter and had the front wing supports angle forwards as it drops to the front wing. Another stunning model from Tameo,
Score 9/10

1/43 Model Review: 2009 Ferrari F60

Background

The car was called the F60 to celebrate the 60th year of competing in Formula One. Having expended much resources contending for the 2008 championship which went down to the last corner of the last lap, Ferrari won the Constructors' Championship whilst Massa lost out on the Drivers' crown. That would work against them as other teams were much more prepared for the new rules for 2009. By mid-season, the car was regularly in the points and challenging for podiums, but Massa suffered a head injury during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix that ruled him out for the rest of the year. Long-time test driver Luca Badoer, last raced in 1999 for Minardi, took the second seat, but was off the pace, and Ferrari hired Fisichella from Force India for the rest of the season. Raikkonen took the team's only win of the year at Belgium, having started from 6th on the grid, being chased all the way by Fisichella, then driving a Force India.

Hot Wheels / Mattel

Hot Wheels P9963

The simpler shaped cars for 2009 should work in favour for Hot Wheels in creating the F60 in 1/43. The car still feels like a toy rather than a model, but the overall shape is not bad. The lack of effort on the driver helmets is bad. However there are growing levels of details on the aerials and the cameras. The suspension is not too bad either and they have put on the wheel rim covers too. So judging from some of the previous offerings from Hot Wheels, their standard is improving, but overall, it still feels too much like a toy.
Score: 6/10

Ixo / Altaya

When I first saw this car, I naturally assumed it was from the same mould as the Hot Wheels car, but on closer inspection this is a model from later on in the season. It has a different exhaust, rear wing endplates and includes the vents on rear of the engine cover. In terms of overall shape, it's of a similar standard to the Hot Wheels car, but when you get to the details and suspension, Hot Wheels has moved on a bit in this department. For me, the biggest let down are the textures. The T-cam is red, the front wing end plates do not have the silver highlights, and there's no Bridgestone logo on the floor near the rear wheels. Overall, it's not that bad a model, still toy like, but its let down by being a bit lazy.
Score: 5/10

BBR

BBR BBRC24

Available from BBR are various versions of the F60 including a Belgian GP edition where Kimi Raikkonen took the team's only victory of the year and this one (pictured above) from the Italian GP (driven by Fisichella).

BBR BBRC25A

As you'd expect, this is of a much higher standard from the previous offerings. The F60 is not a particularly nice looking car, so perhaps this captures it accurately. The finish on the paint, the decals to the shape itself and the details they have added is what you'd come to expect from BBR. This is a very nice model.
Score: 9/10

Where are they now?

Ferrari remains just as involved and just as prestigious and important as it always have been. 2019 should see them compete for the World Championship which they last won in 2007 with Kimi Raikkonen. After being dropped in 2010, Raikkonen was rehired for Ferrari and drove for them between 2014 and 2018 and is about to commence the 2019 season with Alfa Romeo (Sauber). 

Luca Badoer remained Ferrari's test driver until the end of 2010, making the odd appearance at Ferrari demos. To read a bit more about his torrid time with the F60 you can read this fun article here:

https://wtf1.com/post/remembering-luca-badoers-disastrous-ferrari-comeback/

Felipe Massa thankfully returned to Formula 1 in 2010. Some say he wasn't quite as quick as before, whilst the team maintained that was not the case. After nearly retiring in 2016, he actually did retire from F1 at the end of 2017. He's back in racing for Formula E in the 2018/19 championship. 

GP4: 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround part 2

In case you missed it, part 1 of the 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround click here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/gp4-1996-forti-fg01b-walkaround-part-1.html

I was looking back at my old screenshots of this car before it was painted and found this photo:

The white parts are all the newly created parts, the yellow from the existing 1995 car.

Starting off at the front of the car, I remodelled the nose cone quite heavily from the 1995 car which was very low-poly. This is a lot smoother. Unfortunately there is shadow painted on the front wing supports that shouldn't be there, but I think it's a mapping issue.

I've shown the wireframe for this shot so that you can see I started working on smoothing the curve where the nose joins the the side of the cockpit. If I was doing that again today, I would put more polygons to smooth the curve even more.

I found one blurry shot of the cockpit which has this ledge on it. I'm not sure what it was for, maybe you could put your cup of tea there or something. I'm not too happy with the rear of the head rest, but I am pleased with how it joins to the chassis.

I'm quite pleased with how the sidepod turned out, that's one of my favourite parts of my work on this car. There is massive gap for the rear suspension elements which can't have helped the aero.

I like how in GP4 that you can crash the car and parts will fall off, and reveal some of the work going on underneath. The 3D body lines give a bit of depth to the nose.

I'm not sure why Celinho decided to paint his own body lines that don't follow the 3D ones. The hole at the rear of the engine cover (by the Ford logo) is painted on, and it's nicely done. The 1995 rear wing does not look out of place, and the new rear wing endplates fit on very well.

There aren't too many shots of the rear, so its difficult to model this accurately, but from what I could tell, with a little artistic licence, you can see they had a unique approach, with the central part looking more like an extended turning vane than a diffuser. You can see a lot of the gearbox/rear suspension and engine exhausts through the rear of the car.

Here, the car is without its engine and sidepod covers revealing the internals of the car. They are taken from Oggo's Benetton B196 (with permission), hence it comes a Renault engine logo. GP4 doesn't do shadows from the car onto itself, so whilst its nice to have nice textures on engine and a lovely shiny exhaust, in race conditions its usually under shadow and black.

I hope you enjoyed the walkaround of the Forti. It's not the best looking car (not really my fault!), and it's not one of my best models (compared to the rest of the 1996 grid), however many lessons were learned from this car that I developed into the other cars.

GP4: 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround part 1

In the second of my series of my GP4 cars walkarounds, I look back at the first car I created for the 1996 season, the Forti FG01B. There's a bit more about how Forti got on in 1996 in my model review blog post here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/143-model-review-1996-forti-fg03-ford.html

The car was essentially an updated version of their 1995 car, the FG01, which itself was an updated F3000 car.

@UnusualF1 @1990sF1 Forti team launch. Remember this amazing team <3 ? Forti 1995 pic.twitter.com/LJBwziyudv

— UnracedF1 (@UnracedF1) May 23, 2016

I'll come back that when I look back at the 1995 cars. So my starting point, similar to the Minardi M195B, was the 1995 mod version of the FG01 that I created.

1995 Forti FG01 from the GP4 1995 mod

I started off thinking I would re-use parts of the 1995 car, but eventually I would remake it all, with perhaps only the wings making it onto the FG01B.

Putting the two cars next to each other, you can see that there is a lot more detail and effort gone into the 1996 car, owing much to my own learning curve in modelling cars. The shape of the nose is a lot smoother, the sidepods are a lot more realistic and the engine cover is much closer to the real model. The side-head support looks like an after thought, just tacked on for the sake of the regulations, which was what the team did in real life.

The diffuser is pretty basic too, especially when we start looking at the other 1996 cars where teams had started to develop them since the major change in diffuser regulations during the 1994 season, Forti were left behind in this region.

The FG01B was just a stop gap whilst the team prepared for their actual 1996 car, the FG03 (which is beautifully made by Soulbringer in GP4). Like the Minardi, the suspension and damage model are taken from the 1995 mod.

Overall, the car is a step up from the models in the 1995 mod, but its probably the most clunky in terms of my shaping ability in the 1996 mod. I like the work on the nose and the sidepods, but the cockpit sides and the area just in-front of the sidepods I'd would do differently today.

The textures were done by Celinho and so my thanks go to him for painting it, though there are areas of the texture I'd like revisiting if I was around to give feedback when it was created. So below are a few shots without the textures applied.

I was still perfecting my technique of how to make a model with nice smooth normals around the curves and this was my first attempt at bodylines. In fact, the method I adopted for the Minardi for bodylines is the same that I use today, but this was my first attempt at them. You can see where the polygon lines are denser as to where I tried to make a smooth shape with the light bouncing off it correctly.

You can see from this angle from the rear how the engine cover was hastily amended to incorporate the driver side head rest protection. I can't imagine the wake coming off that and how draggy it would have been and probably would have made the rear wing much less effective.

Without the wireframe, you can see how the light bounces off each surface smoothly (ish). The bodylines are also clearly seen here, though looking back, I forgot to create the front suspension cover.

Click here for part 2, where I will look at some of the details of this car.
Below is a video of a converted version of my car in rfactor 2.

You can download this car along with season specific liveries in the GP4 1996 mod.
1996 GP4 Mod Download Part 1
1996 GP4 Mod Download Part 2

1/43 Model Review: 1996 Forti FG03 Ford

Background

Forti joined Formula 1 largely due to backing from Pedro Diniz's family, but when Diniz left after the first year and took his sponsorship with him, the team struggled with finances. Already having a particularly uncompetitive car, condemned to the rear of the grid in 1995, the 1996 saw new rules introduced where cars must qualify within 107% of the pole position time. Basically the rule was brought in because the Forti cars were so slow and getting lapped so often during Grand Prix.

The lack of finances meant they ran an upgraded version of their 1995 car, the FG01B, for the first few races. One FG03 was ready for Imola and qualified comfortably within the 107% limit and 0.7s behind the next fastest car. Prior to the Spanish GP, a deal was done to sell the team to Shannon Racing, and the car turned Green, losing the yellow and blue colour that ran in memory of Ayrton Senna. But the money never materialised, the car, though having promising pace, retired with poor reliability, and as debts to Cosworth rose, there were no new engines to run.

At the British GP, they only managed a couple of laps in practice, in Germany, the cars remained unassembled in the garage with no engines. The team decided to bow out of the sport, whilst a court case was in progress over who owned the team. Eventually, Shannon Racing won the case in September, but Forti had already left F1. Both entities folded from any further racing activities.

Onyx

Onyx 288

Sadly only Onyx have produced any Forti models, there's not even one of the 1995 car. Even worse, they didn't even bother creating the shape either, it's a rehashed Tyrrell 024 (see Tyrrell below for comparison)! Fans of Formula 1 from the 90's will inevitably be fans of the underdog teams, and I'm no exception, so I would really love a proper Forti model.

Onyx 290

At least we get both liveries of the Forti. In fact the yellow livery evolved through the year, earning a green stripe when the Shannon Racing was first announced, before donning the green, white and red livery for a couple of races before their demise. Sadly no bright green rims on these cars.

Onyx 276

So to the score, it's a case of is it better to have something that's not great, or to have nothing at all. I gave it a 2, because it could be worse, but there's much to be improved on.
Score: 2/10

To read more reviews from the 1996 season, click here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/p/1996-model-review.html