France has Norev, the Americans have M2 Machines, Greenlight and Autoworld, the Germans have Schuco and the Japanese have Tomica and Kyosho yet strangely British collectors have no comparable premium 1/64 ranges to collect, a huge and very lucrative market which has yet to be exploited! The closest thing for me is the 1/76 Oxford Diecast series which although is a bit too small for my liking has a truly huge and diverse range of modern and classic vehicles with a particular emphasis on ones from Britain. The makers obviously know their target audience well and explains why you will find some of British Leylands finest cars in miniature form and surely they don't get more magnificent than the Austin/Morris/Wolsely 18/22 / Leyland Princess/Austin Morris Princess range! A fabulous slice of 1970's wedge styling with amazing amounts of passenger space and Rolls Royce beating comfort dragged down by the usual Leyland own goals of initial poor reliability, quality, lack of a hatchback and a damn confusing branding strategy. To this day everyone calls it an "Austin Princess" when technically it was never called this, Princess was unconvincingly meant to be a marque name in itself though no one outside their marketing department ever saw it that way, not even the DVLA! This Tahiti blue version is the latest recolour of this casting and for the scale its reassuringly well detailed and styled, those unique trapezoidal headlamps are present along with badging and pretty much every external panel is accurate right down to the side coachlines. The price of these little Oxford models continues to rise so they will only ever be an occasional treat though one day hopefully a cheap alteration to the old will produce a nice Austin Ambassador! ;-p
Bought recently from my nearest model shop called 2k Technologies. Mint and boxed.
Loading contexts...
