Build Your Own McLaren F1 Car

26 Mar 2011

Times have changed since I was little. No longer is it enough to collect stickers and put them in an album. Your Mam would give you a few pennies and off you’d pop to the corner shop (another almost extinct institution) and exchange them for some stickers. No, now you can buy a weekly magazine which will allow you to construct a 1:8 scale static model of the 2008 championship winning Vodafone McLaren Mercedes MP4-23 driven by Lewis Hamilton. Apparently it’s a fantastic addition to any modeller’s collection.

DeAgostini have been plugging this on the TV a lot, presumably since the F1 season has restarted. But the idea of building a model using components in a weekly magazine has always puzzled me. Does anyone actually get every magazine and do they complete the project. It’s particularly poignant since the cost of this project, in my opinion, is astronomical. In the usual advert small-print there are 85 issues at £7.99 per issue (give or take the first ones being a bit cheaper). That’s around £670. That is a lot of money for a model which, as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually do anything.

If it’s anything like the models I’ve been unfortunate to buy over the years for the kids it’ll fall to bits when you get it fully assembled. Fair enough if it actually fits together, without glue, but the glue is there to make sure it stays together then that’s fine, but if it’s glue alone then forget it.

What a ridiculous project. People must have more money than sense. FFS people are actually tweeting about it. The world has officially gone stark raving bonkers.