Revisiting Some Old Toy Cars

I bet you grew up with at least a few little toy cars. And I bet you raced them against each other. Who didn’t? Making race courses around furniture and whizzing them along the carpet (hard floors were much more exciting though!).

My collection was a random mix of all sorts. Vintage diecast Matchbox cars I should’ve looked after, cheap plastic ones from the pound shop, Hot Wheels, and more. If it had wheels that moved it was good enough for me. Some of these old toy cars I’ve held onto, others, especially the cheap ones, fell by the wayside over the years. I thought I’d do a little blog post to show you some of those I still have now.

Recreating the 1996 F1 season

The most treasured of all were the single seater models – mostly replicas of F1 cars or Indycars. These would always be the best drivers on the grid. Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher – that sort of thing. I had a BBC magazine of the 1996 F1 season review which had the drivers and teams and tried as best I could to recreate the grid with the cars available. I’d try and use cars in the same colour as a team’s livery. New York taxis lined up against Land Rovers on my F1 grid. From what I can remember, the protagonists included:

• Damon Hill – a Matchbox replica of Mansell’s 1992 Williams
• Michael Schumacher – looking a lot like a Brabham BT55 in a Ferrari livery, also Matchbox
• Eddie Irvine – a Corgi “F1 car” that was really something akin to an Indycar but with Ferrari logos and Ferrari sponsors all over it
• Martin Brundle – another Matchbox, also pretending to be F1 but suspiciously like a mid-80s Indycar
• Riccardo Rosset – a cheap, garish and bulbous mostly pink single seater
• Pedro Lamy – a Matchbox green Land Rover Defender, with a white roof
• Andrea Montermini – a cream saloon-style car, plastic

Only the first four of that list have survived, and I’m sure some of the others cars I’ve kept were on that grid, but I can’t remember the specifics. It really was a case of “anything will do”.

The bigger, special cars

I had a few larger model cars too. These were ‘special’ and were on display more than being raced round the furniture. The Schumacher Benetton B195 has a pull-back motor in it, and I think I was bought it at Silverstone, some time in the late 90s. The BBurago McLaren MP4/5B originally had a companion in the form of a Benetton B190. After I’d bought the latter with some pocket money I was so keen to get it out of the packaging I snapped one of the rear wheels off before we’d even got home… I’ve since made up for that by building a kit of the B190 instead!

Tough love for tough toys

The Testarossa and Jaguar in the photo below are both Corgi, the rest being Matchbox. The green Porsche 911 is a Matchbox from the 1970s, somehow one of the A-pillars came away from the roof so I snapped the whole thing off… And in similar toy car destruction I really disliked the rear spoiler on the Escort RS Cosworth so snapped that off too. Madness! And yes that’s a “5” written on the roof in marker pen… As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a home video somewhere of me as a toddler repeatedly smashing that blue Corvette into the bottom of a relative’s oven. I loved all these cars, honest.

The mark of how much I enjoyed playing with these cars as a youngster can be measured by how chipped they are. None of them are worth anything now, but the monetary value, as with anything with fond childhood memories, is irrelevant. Each one has a story for me and a meaning or memory of some sort. I hope you’ve enjoyed taking a trip through some of those memories of my old toy cars. I’d love to see pictures and stories of yours too, share them in the comments below.