Mini John Cooper Works WRC - Rallye Deutschland 2011

Right let's turn this school girl runabout into a rally monster. 

First thing was to get rid of puny stock spoiler. 

Now to start on the wheel arches. I trimmed down the rear bumper. 

I bought some wheel arches but they were no where near the right shape so I started building them from scratch. Also I reshaped the front vents. 

 

Added some putty to build up the shape of the arches. 

And cut openings for the bonnet vents 

Filled in some details of the vents. 

A few rounds of filling and sanding later. I'm sure other people would have spent more time getting this perfectly smooth but I'm not that kind of person; being overly perfectionist ruins the fun for me. This is good enough. 

Primed. 

 

And started on the underside. 

 

 

 

 

I built the suspension stock for 3 reasons.
1. I have no idea how the rally suspension is different ot the road car
2. If I did rebuild the suspension it woudl likely be quite flimsy
3. Most importantly, I couldn't be bothered. 

A lick of paint on the body. 

The wheels I bought didn't have axels so I added some. I left them long as I was not sure how much I'd need to extend them to fit the wheel arches. 

Now to trim the axels to fit. 

Perfect, turns out I didn't need to extend the wheels at all. 

I should have measured the wheels before but the wider wheels matched the wider arches perfectly. 

I fashioned some new exhaust tips. I'm not going to add them till later as it is a right paint to get the bodywork on and the exhaust tips would make life more difficult. 

I also noticed the rally car does not have a fuel cap, so I sanded that off. 

Now for the interior. The road car interior is so different I wasn't sure if it was worth reusing. In the end I decided to use it so it would help get the door panels aligned. 

Hacked down and built up a base of the boot. 

 

 

The seats are not quite right. They should say Prodrive not Recaro but I didn't have the right decals. I though it would look better with the wrong decals rather than no decals. Also I saw a video of the car with blue seatbelts so that's what I did. Then later on I saw a picture from this specifc rally and they were red. But by that point I thought it would create more of a mess to change them to red. 

The road car pedals were completely wrong so I built some new ones. 

With the interior details added. 

Hacked down the dashboard to match te rally car. 

The dial in front of the driver was close enough and I just added some rough details the the centre console. 

A bit more paint on the bodywork but alas I ran out of white paint. 

The front vents took a good chunk of work to cut out the grill and reshape 

But the vents look good in place. 

Added the rear light. 

That's all for now. I'll get some more white paint and pick this up again in a couple of months time. Next job will be to build a rollcage. 

I made a little cardboard template for the roll cage to make sure it doesn't foul the roof. 

The middle part of the roll cage done. 

I realised I'd forgotten to build the suspension thingies in the back. 

The roll cage is starting to take shape. 

I took a few liberties with the roll cage to get it to fit round the seat. Over all it it a bit wonky but good enough for me. 

The decals didn't include the tire decals. I found these in my bag of bits. I think they were from one of the early Belkits models, when they were absolutely terrible before they changed their decal printer. And 10 years in the garage hasn't helped. 

I did consider putting 2 spares in because they only came in sets of 4. But I wasn't quite sure where to put the second one so I just stuck with one. 

Starting the steering wheel. 

And painted. 

Steering wheel mounted. 

And painted the steering wheel mount. 

The dash and door panels were a bit difficult to fit in round the roll cage. 

I had to hack out the lights. I used a couple of lights from my bag of bits, I've no idea what they are from but they fitted nicely. 

I'm really pleased with this result. 

 

Added the windows and tint. 

 

I was a bit worried the body shell would not fit over all the interior modifications, but after a bit of wiggling, it fitted perfectly. 

 

I simplified the rear wing design into something I could make out of this spare Citroën DS3 spoiler and plastic sheet. This would be an ideal use case for a 3D printer. 

I've no idea what the skid plates were like on this car so just did something similar to the Ford Fiesta RS WRC 

And painted 

It looks pretty good with the new exhaust tips. 

The decals are very good quality. Most of them fitted perfectly except the blue Ultimate decals. 

 

 

Building a roof scoop. 

Some of the tyre decals have come off and I lost the driver's door handle. 

It's a Christmas miracle I found the door handle. 

I think that is a pretty good match of the blue. I was on the fence about the wing mirrors. In the end I just used the stock mirrors. The rally ones are the same shape but much smaller, I think it would have just ended up a mess if I'd tried to create something more accurate. I've also replaced some of the tyre decals that disintegrated. 

 

I can't help but feel I've forgotten something... 

...perfect! 

 

 

The 37s 

I thought I'd add some more photos of the figure. I wanted a base so the figure didn't fall over. There were loads of filing and sanding debris from modifying the car so I stuck a bunch onto a bit of plastic sheet and painted it to make it look kind of like broken up tarmac. 

Logically since I'd modified the car to the rally car I should have modified the figure into Dani Sordo. That was a bit beyond my capabilities so I settled on Dani Schoolgirl. 

I was going to base this of my old school colours but I ended up using waaay to much flat base which made the blue much lighter. I thought it still worked so I kept it. 

Turns out face details are hard so it went a bit like terrifying clown make up. 

Sorry this is a bit blurry but I wanted to show how unnatural the Tamiya flash coloured paint is. I didn't want an Oompa-Loompa so I mixed it with some white. 

I converted the bag into a shoulder bag using some painted masking tape and some spare seatbelt fittings. 

I finally managed to get the face looking roughly human. 

The bag worked out well and sat fairly naturally. 

And the reason I changed the bag was to free up her hands for a racing helmet to go with the car. This one was left over from a previous Impreza kit.