Nope, not your Mom’s promiscuous photos again – newcomer Chade is making his TLCB debut with his neat remote controlled convertible sports car. Like your Mom though, Chade can fit a lot in; underneath the compact bodywork are a Power Functions rechargeable battery, L-Motor, Servo Motor and IR receiver. There’s more to see on Eurobricks – click the link above for all the photos.
Flickr’s _Tiler could have his own page here at TLCB, so regularly does he appear. His latest build is a model that we want so much it hurts. His brilliant wide-arched Datsun 240Z shows you don’t need to build big to build special. You can see more of _Tiler’s 6-wide masterpiece at his photostream – click the link above to make the jump.
It’s getting tight at the top of TLCB Summer Building Competition! This 1960s Marcos 1600GT has arrived from previous bloggee and Featured TFOL Harry Gravett, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.
Marcos were founded in 1959 by Frank Costin and Gem Marsh (MARsh and COStin), and manufactured kit, racing and production cars primarily for the UK market.
Frank Costin was an aircraft engineer who worked on the wooden framed De Havilland Mosquito bomber. Following the war his brother, Mike Costin (who later founded Cosworth), started work at Lotus, and he asked Frank to join the team to bring his aerodynamic talents. Frank used his engineering skill to design cars for Lotus, Maserati and Lister, before deciding to create his own lightweight wooden chassis, setting up Marcos with his business partner Gem Marsh.
Like rivals TVR, Marcos sourced parts from volume manufacturers such as Ford and Triumph, and fitted these to their own glass-fibre bodywork. As is always the way with small British sports car builders, they faced several financial problems during their history, finally ceasing to produce in 2007.
Marcos’ glory days came in the late 1990s when their hugely powerful sports cars were raced all over the world. Still loosely based on the original 1960s design, the cars had swelled and distorted almost beyond recognition, and were perhaps some of the more aesthetically challenged sports cars on the market.
Not Harry’s though – his 1600GT is true to the original (well, apart from the third brake light at the rear), being simple, pretty and light. Which are not any of the characteristics TLCB Elves look for in a vehicle. Luckily Harry’s got that covered and has built a striped, be-winged and huge engined version just for them. He even put a box of ‘Smarties’ in the back, which the Elves immediately ate and are now regretting.*
You can see more of Harry’s beautiful Model Team Marcos on both MOCpages and Flickr, and you can enter your own model into TLCB Summer Building Competition by clicking here.
* ‘Shitting bricks’ has never been so literal.
We don’t often post fictional Lego vehicles here at TLCB because they are – for the most part – crap. Occasionally though, there are exceptions, and this is one such time. Built by TLCB regular Peteris Sprogis, and a little reminiscent of Mercedes’ SLS, is this ‘Motte Redoora’. We don’t know what that means but we do really like it. You can check out all the shots on either MOCpages or Flickr.
The Elves are little grumpy today as this find comes from one of you. Suggested via the Feedback page is previous bloggee piratecox‘s mean-looking ‘Outlaw’ Datsin 240Z. Complete with a roll-cage, big rims, flared arches and a front mounted intercooler(?) it’s been built and photographed superbly, and you can see more at the link above.
This bewitchingly beautiful creation comes from TLCB favourite _Tiler. A lesson in both brilliant Lego building and exceptional photography, _Tiler’s gorgeous Datsun 240Z is surely one of the mini-figure scale highlights of the year so far.
You can see all the images of _Tiler’s recreation of Japan’s best known classic sports car on Flickr – click the link above to make the jump.
This is not a Lotus 7. Or a Caterham 7. Or a Westfield 7. Or indeed any variation on the 7 theme that we knew of. It is in fact a Donkervoort S8A, which is a new one on us, but nevertheless it looks great in Lego form. Previous bloggee Vinny Turbo is on a roll, and you can see more of his latest creation here.
The appropriately named Vinny Turbo has just uploaded a load of new builds onto his MOCpages and Flickr accounts. Unfortunately this has resulted in a disorderly hoard of Elves stampeding into The Lego Car Blog offices and demanding Smarties of all sorts of colours. After dispersing our chaotic co-workers with a liberal use of Mister Airhorn, we’ve chosen a couple of the best to share with you.
At the top of this post is the Integra, a re-worked version of an earlier car, which now comes with adjustable front Bat-spoiler. At the bottom of this post is the sleek and refined VTS V10, which features some interesting SNOT bodywork. Also worth a look are the Bentrolls Steam Cloud limousine and the VTS Edge with its curvaceous black body. Click on the links in the text to see more of Vinny’s work.
Despite the complete debacle that is the ‘Caterham’ Formula 1 team, we still quite like the company that makes their road cars (they’ve got nothing to do with the F1 outfit anyway). Unfortunately though Caterhams are surprisingly pricey cars. Of course you can save a few quid by building one yourself, but then you’d have no friends, and you’d talk about spanners in your sleep for months.
Luckily Carl Greatrix has the answer! After refining his previously featured Caterham Super 7 design you can now vote for it to become an official LEGO set through the LEGO Ideas platform. It’s not just any 7 either, but the ridiculous 620R version.
Visit Carl’s Flickr page for details, and if he secures enough votes you might be able to build your own Caterham 7 at home, and keep your friends!
This glorious 1991 TVR S3 comes from Flickr and MOCpage’s Mortal Swordsman, who’s been commissioned by the Auto Trader car selling website to recreate readers’ cars in Lego. You can see more of this lovely early ’90s S3 on Flickr, and you can read a little more about the now defunct TVR company by visiting one of our previous posts here.
It might sound a bit like the outside of a nipple, but Angka Utama‘s little 8-wide Aerossa concept car is as good a design as models five times its size. You can see all the photos of his latest creation on Flickr via the link above.
Slower, but better. There’s a lot to be said about slidey rear-wheel-drive cars like the Toyota GT86 / Subaru’s BRZ twins, and here at TLCB Towers – as you’d expect for a car blog – we absolutely love cars like this.
TLCB regular Senator Chinchilla has recreated the Japanese icon beautifully in white bricks, and fantastically complicated it is too – such swoopy bodywork is fiendishly difficult to replicate from the straight angles of Lego pieces.
You can see how the Senator has done it by visiting Flickr via the link above, although we still think he’s some sort of wizard.
Many of Angka Utama’s cars are like the Elves, complex and small. The Toscana is a good example of this, including a drop down rear engine. Actually, on second thoughts the Elves are a worryingly simple bunch. On third thoughts, the Elves’ diet of sugary Smarties and fizzy drinks means that they’re getting a bit tubby too. Please click on this link to Angka’s Flickr Photostream to have a closer look at the Toscana’s features, whilst we go and find some better similes.*
*I didn’t want to be a blog writer anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack.
After struggling to find any cars for the past few days one of the Elves has hit an automative jackpot; previous bloggee Harry Gravett has published no less than seven TVR sports cars in one go to MOCpages! Here we pick two of our favourites.
Beginnings
TVR were founded in 1947 in Blackpool, England, producing cars in kit-form as well as turning existing production cars into specials. Soon they were building their own sports cars, using mostly off-the-shelf components from larger manufacturers such as Ford and Rover, and then hitting the race track with their products.
One of TVR’s most loved early models was the Vixen, as built by Harry in the above image. Powered by a little Ford 1600 engine from the Cortina, and later by the big Triumph six-cylinders in Tuscan form, the Vixen sold well, with around 1,000 produced between 1967 and 1973. Quite a few survive today too, as plastic bodywork meant the Vixen didn’t suffer from the no.1 British classic car killer; rust.
The Middle
The seventies ushered in a new era of wedge-shaped Rover V8-powered sports cars, like the 350S pictured below. Small, and always seemingly on the brink of financial crisis (like most independent British sports car makers of the time), TVR continued right up until the mid 2000s, by which time they had developed their own engines, raced successfully at the highest level in sports and endurance categories, and created some of the most stunning shapes ever seen on road cars.
The End
And then it all went horribly wrong. The architect of TVR’s modern era, Peter Wheeler, sold the company to Russian millionaire Nikolay Smolensky. The new ownership lasted less than 3 years before Smolensky first tried to move production out of England, and then folded the company altogether. And thus TVR became yet another victim of the clueless millionaire ownership club.
In the subsequent years many rumours circulated of TVR’s return to vehicle production, all of which amounted to nothing (like most independent British sports car makers of the time) and TVR quietly disappeared from the public conscious, save for the occasional child-delight when a distinctive straight 6 or V8 sports car rumbled past down a British street.
New Beginnings?
In 2013 Nikolay Smolensky decided to sell the dead TVR name to British businessman Les Edgar. Edgar has now started the long process of developing a new range of sports cars with the aim of reviving the once legendary name.
Here at TLCB we’re not expecting much (or indeed anything) to result in this well-meaning revival attempt – history is not on Edgar’s side – but we wish him the very best of luck. Who knows, one day we might even hear a new rumble…
