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Dale Jr's 2003 BGN Daytona Winner!!


For the second year in a row, Dale Earnhardt Jr put an OREO car in Victory lane at the opening BGN race of the season, in Daytona. Only difference was, it was not the beloved"3" he drove to victory in 2003, but his own signature "8" as part of a new BGN team, CHANCE 2, jointly owned by Little E and his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt.

According to Dale, having an ownership role will allow him to better understand all the ins and outs of running a NASCAR racing team.

With the backing and resources avaiable to this team, success is expected right out of the box, particularly in restrictoracin'. Fortunately, Dale was able to deliver on this expectation in the race, being the dominant car all day.

When I saw the car, my first thought was: "Boy, wait'll that '03 kit gets here this summer! This is a must-do kit!" My second thought was "I thought the '03 Chevies would look a lot different than last year!"

The mystery was cleared up on Randy's Board, where it was confirmed that NASCAR was allowing last year's body into this race, to try and keep costs down (this is hoped to help achieve a full field...not always a given in BGN...).

Now, I was excited! All we needed was for Sam to pull the graphics together!

Sam came through in fine form, with files arriving within a week of the race. Meantime I had begun to get the chassis done, and minor body mods done. I started with the 2000 regular Gordon glue kit. All I did was open up the slit in the rear spoiler for the template, from what I could see, the rest of the car was pretty close, as a lot of the special restrictostuff from the last two seasons seemed to have been dropped. On the chassis, I added the Earnhardt bar, seatbelts, engine oil lines, and the radio coil on the steering column. Other than that, I was happy to stay box-stock.

The painting turned out a bit trickier than I had intended. The body was primed in PlastiKote white primer, then I shot it with Tamiya TS8 red. Looking at references, that was not orange enough, so i blended some TS8 with TS36 Fluorescent Orange in a glass bottle. Once i had the colour looking ok, I reshot the model through my airbrush with it. So far, so good. The car has a fogged in yellow band all around the bottom. To simulate this, I sptayed TAMIYA TS16 yellow into a bottle, and fogged in the bottom of the car. That was when the trouble started. The yellow always seemed to be too red, no matter how thick it was put on!. I finally came to the conclusion that one of the two TAMIYA paints in the red undercoat must have a "bleeding" pigment in it, that was drawn up thru the yellow by the solvents present, imparting a red tone. I finally was able to overcome this by spraying some PlastiKote white prime into a bottle, and fogging it on over the yellow, to form a bleederseal coat. I was then able to apply the yellow, and get the bright yellow colour desired. I then sprayed on a couple coats of TAMIYA TS13 clear, and the body was nice and glossy, ready for decals.

Sam had sent a gorgeous set of decals and some refence pics from Jayski's site for me of the car at what was likely a press release. All I had to do was a bit of resizing, and they were ready to go. Decal application was going swimmingly,then I picked up the copy of Winston Cup Scene that covered the race. Knowing that the path from press release car to car as raced can often lead to changes, I compared my in-process model to the one pic of the car in the newspaper. Wattaya know? They had gone and chaged the OREO script over the rear wheels from the "straight" script to the more modern panoramic one! This meant I had to stop, add a couple new graphics to Sam's images, and reprint them. Problem solved, andf The decal sheet now carries both styles of OREO, in case anyone is into building "press release cars"....(note: the "straight" version has been increased in size to better match references.)

("Press Release" version on left, as raced on right...)

All decals except headlight and grille decals, and fender contingencies, came from the decal sheet we put together for a 3 Amigos offering. The headlights came from the new JWTBM goodies sheet, and the fender decals came from the SLIXX 2002 contingency sheet. Once all the decals were in place and had had a couple days to dry, I applied several light dustcoats of TMAIYA TS13 clear from a heated rattlecan, then polished the body up to a nice shine with Turtle Wax. This is a nice bright-looking model, stands out on the shelf!

So, Dale met all the fans' and media expectations, by qualifying on the pole, and leading the most laps (67 of 120) en route to a farly easy win. Altho Kenseth could close up on him, he did not have enough oomph to make a passing attempt at the end. This was to be the high point of Little E's Feb 2003 Daytona adventure, as the next day, he had all kinds of problems in a frustrating rain-interrupted and shortened race, finishing outside of the top thirty...

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