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Nostalgia trip: Ford Focus WRC 1999

Time for another car, only it’s a little bit different than the Gaslands vehicles from my last post. Back in 2000 or 2001, I bought a Tamiya RC kit for the 1999 World Rally Championship season Ford Focus. I had a lot of fun building and upgrading it with better electronics and faster motor. And of course driving it. Over the years, though, the polycarbonate body shell has received quite a few bumps, cuts and scratches.

Ford Focus WRC 1999

A little while back I decided to buy a new shell for my RC car. I could not find an original Tamiya shell, but Hpi racing makes a very good aftermarket shell with sticker sheet for the 1999 WRC. There are many little differences between the Tamiya and Hpi shells, but the overall appearance is very nice. And most importantly, it fits perfectly on the Tamiya chassis. It does not come with side mirrors, though, so I simply transferred those over from my original Tamiya shell. 

Somewhat confusingly, an RC car shell is transparent and you paint the inside rather than the outside. This means that you do everything in reverse and that there is a lot of masking involved as you can’t correct mistakes by painting over them. 

Doing a bit of googling taught me that the following approach would be best for my car. Most people tend to use spray cans or airbrushes to paint their shells, but you could also use brushes, as long as you use paints that are specifically meant for lexan/polycarbonate shells. Normal paints simply won’t stick properly. 

Although there are some small mistakes here and there, I think it turned out pretty well.

- Shells tend to arrive as vacuformed sheets of lexan/polycarbonate shapes that need to be cut out. So start with that. Then clean the inside of the shell to remove grease that will prevent the paint from sticking.

- If you use multiple colours, start with the darkest colour, in this case red. Mask off the windows and everything meant to be white. Then apply the red in several very thin coats. Red does not want to cover very well, even after using a full spray can. Don’t worry, though, as this will be sorted in the following step.

- After letting the final red coat dry overnight remove all masking tape except the window masks. You can then paint everything white, including the areas you painted red previously. The white acts as a backing colour for the red, which makes the end result look much better.

- Let it dry overnight again before removing the window masks. If you want, you can now tape off everything apart from the windows and apply several very thin coats of a ‘smoke’ paint to tint the windows. This will hide the electronics on the inside.

- Let dry overnight again before removing the final masks and protective cover on the outside of the shell. Then it’s a matter of attaching the spoiler and mirrors, if you have those, and applying the decals.

Ford Focus WRC 1999

I used the following paints, but I’m sure other brands are available:

Tamiya PS-1 (white)

Tamiya PS-2 (red)

Tamiya PS-31 (smoke)

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