Friday 7 January 2011

Aston vs Ferrari

In 'Goldfinger', the henchmen drive a Mercedes-Benz 180.  I wanted something more special than that to race against the DB5.  In the early scenes of 'GoldenEye', Bond races the Aston against a Ferrari 355 Spider driven by Xenia Onatopp.


I'm not a big fan of 80s and 90s Ferraris so figured something more classic should race against my DB5.  A car I love from the early sixties with a good racing pedigree is the Ferrari 250 GTO.


This car represents chassis no 4399 as raced by Mike Parkes at the Coppa Inter Europa race at Monza, Italy in September 1963.  The car finished 1st in class and 2nd overall, losing to an Aston Martin appropriately enough, one of the two DP214 prototypes.  I found this newspaper clipping of the Ferrari in the actual race.


I bought this car to cheer me up after being too ill to visit the annual Slotcar swapmeet at Swindon with Andy.


The cars look great together - almost too good to race, but I don't want to become one of those types of collectors.  These are slot cars after all and I've got plenty of superglue!