Superdetailed 959 Ickx

Here’s my long term built of my favorite Tamiya ever: The 959 Dakar number 185 Jacky Ikcx. I already built a boxart from a NIB with the yellow wheels as seen in my showroom. A year ago I made the plans of making the number 187 and 185 from NIB. Now the first 185 is finished. I want to do a high detailed version with leds. I opened one of my NIB and started building along with my NB chassis and NIB bodyset. 2 chassis and the bodies were build at the same time so very time consuming to make the bodies. It took over a year to finish them. I masked the lights and they were sprayed clear orange and red. Next was the recreation of the correct names and 187,185 numbers. This was done in Illustrator by my wife and professionally printed into stickers to the qualitylevel of TC repro’s. Rothmans logo was added, additional BEHR logo on the rear and the correct names and licenceplates. The VSD-NASA was from the original decals and the number was replaced. The gold and red striped were cut vinyl because the original wrinkle a lot. I made some led holders from various light buckets from Tamtech 934, Lambo… The front blinkers were made from led tubes to have a line-light. I wanted to use the rear roof lights so I drilled out the plastics to fit a 3mm led and the sides were drilled to add realism to the lights. I fitted a 3racing light set with oporating lights, brakelight, blinkers, and blue toproof lights. I hope to post the moviefile to see all working. The chassis was stock with some alu rear suspensionarms and Tekin ESC to handle Lipo. Some metal exhausts were added. With wires and matt white vinynl mudflaps. After doing some research on the actual Paris-Dakar I noticed that the 3 cars had 2 kind of wheels; blanc alu and white painted. Because several rimsets were not painted to the end of the race they were used at random so some pictures (http://www.jacky-ickx-fan.net/web/site_galerie.php?idx=422&id=5) show the white and grey wheels at the same time. So I did that with the superb wheels from Rad22rad. They also used a horn on the front side of the car so this was recreated in some turned alu parts (thanks Tom!) which were sprayed red and mounted on a piece a lexan. The drivers were also painted with there correct helmets and I added some microfones to them. A lot of work went into painting the 4 drivers because also the 185 was built and painted at the same time. Some Hpi screenwipers were added. I have a Tamiya 1:12 display case wich was perfect for this 959. The base was covered in the new Diorama textuaring sand and done.
The Jochen Mass 187 version is being finish in the exact same way only with a brushless setup but is not finished yet. The leds must be installed
I will a new entry with closeups of the details
Hope you like it.