Today starts with, as I suspected the start of the bodywork, and it's two heft slabs of pale forest green plastic as the panels of the Land Rover Discoery become the slightly more svelte Le Mans car. The most important thing in this part is the use of stickers. I could have taken the cowards way out and made sure they were all hidden but instead I took the few pieces of 'carbon fibre' looking stickers and made sure I used them a)where they made sense and b)in the same place on both sides of the car - I think it works, but we will see on the final model. Also mad props to the designer for the effect to get the slope from the top to the sides right, the cool grey cooling vents and again this is all rock solid. - So impressive
Then it's on to the front of the car. Now they say that every car has a face, and the likeability of any car is about how we connect with that face, because we are programmed to evaluate human faces to know if they are safe to be friends with or not, so I think about this as putting a face on the car.
Like any good hipster it needs a big old moustache, some might call it a front wing to help with air flow but in my mind it's a twirly moustache to help let us know that this guy is a tosser. And yes I might have built this wing separate before attaching it to the car completely upside down (which strangely still worked) before looking at the instructions and realizing what I'd done - no harm just a couple of pieces to undo, flip over and reattach.
Then it's one to THE most important part - the eyes. the eyes are the window to the soul or some shit that maybe Shakespeare said anyway here are this car's
They are actually very similar to the original Land Rovers, the actual lights and surronds just flipped on the side, but it's the big old towers that they are housed in, I love the proportions of this car they - it's so huge and clunky.
It's also dawning on me that maybe you don't know what a Le Mans Prototype racecar (or LMP) looks like in real life - being a prototype they are all slightly different but here is a reasonable example of what we are aiming for:
Looking at that you can probably work out that the next thing we need is a nose and you can probably tell from the model so far that we have the supports all in place and just need to fancy covering so, here it is, not my very clever us of stickered pieces - the red squares breaking up the sea of green.
The final steps before at around Step 600 (which means we are now 3/4 of the way though and on track to final tomorrow) are the wheel arches. T'm not a huge fan of the open top above what will be the wheel but I just you have to work with what you have.
So what is left to do? We have to build the driver's capsule/canopy and the rear panel work - it feels like I'm close and as you can see from the ever reducing amount of pieces around the car I'm starting to get low of pieces so I hope to God we are close it would be very disappointing to realise at the end you didn't have the pieces you needed to finish.
Oh and for those who want to see the whole process go here: