Howplaneshelpdesignscalextric

While Scalextric’s designers often rely heavily on manufacturer CAD data to help give an outline of their products, those sorts of files are not always readily available.

For the older cars, often part of the firm’s Legends collection, CAD data never existed in the first place, forcing the researchers and designers into alternative methods.

“A lot of our top-range models are in great demand from collectors, so they have to be almost like motorised Minichamps models – accuracy is incredibly important,” says researcher Simon Owen.

“With some of the classic cars – like the Jaguar E-type or the very rare Ferrari 330 P4 there’s very few design documents around. Sometimes we can get hold of manufacturer drawings to model from, or blueprints. Motorsport has a great history of keeping things like that. Aside from that we work a lot from very detailed historical photographs.

“But in some cases we’ll also use laser scanning. Being part of Hornby we’re a sister brand to Airfix and have access to 3D Lidar scanning technology that usually gets used to scan models of helicopters and aeroplanes. It uses lasers to get point cloud data and builds a digital shell for whatever we’re modelling.

“We’ve used it to work on some touring cars, but we’ve had a few hiccups with it too. We were recreating one BTCC team’s car as they didn’t have the CAD data, but when we turned up they’d polished the car to within an inch of its life. The laser can’t get a reading on anything too shiny so we essentially had to make the car dirty by half-polishing it and leaving a load of wax residue over it to be able to scan it. That’s a funny process when you’re doing something like a million pound classic car and you have to ask the owners to make it dirty!”