Sun Star Back to the Future III DeLorean

It’s hard to grasp that the first Back to the Future film is 37 years old. Released in 1985, it spawned two sequels and in all three it featured a stainless steel bodied, gull wing door DeLorean sports car. Each film showed the car increasingly modified for time travel, though the third instalment looked less sophisticated, as the car had been trapped in time back in 1885. I’ll work on the basis that you know the story, but in essence, in order to get the car to time travel it must be driving at 88mph.

As there’s no suitable fuel in the 1880s the decision is made to push the car to the speed with a stolen steam locomotive. It’s this version of the car that we have here, one of three 1:18 scale models produced by Sun Star, representing the cars from all three films. As you can see, the most notable change from the original film version are the flanged railway wheels. It also has more ‘gubbins’ attached to the bonnet of the car, the functions of which you can imagine for yourself, though they appear to be radio valves. Sun Star models are usually a tad more detailed than their peers in this scale and the DeLorean is no exception. Most of the added components are painted or printed in appropriate colours, including the black cables attached to the sides of the vehicle. The gull wing doors lift to reveal a fully detailed interior, complete with readable instrument gauges and another collection of mysterious boxes and gadgets that have been installed to facilitate its time-spanning exploits.

Sun Star cars are generally a wee bit more expensive than other 1:18 scale models, one presumes because of the additional work that goes into their extra details. I understand that it should retail around the £128 mark, which these days is actually pretty good for such a nice model. However, I noticed that at the time of writing Classic American advertiser McLaren Models was offering the Back to the Future DeLorean cars on its website at £99 each, which is a bargain. See McLaren’s advert for contact details or visit www. mclaren-models.com

A wide range of die-cast models and American-range plastic kits are available online at competitive prices. However, you should be able to source most models reviewed in Scale Autos from www. modelstore.co.uk or see American Classic Diecast at www.american-classic-diecast.co.uk