Identifying Revell/Monogram NASCAR Model Kits

by Bill Siebler

Now I'm a perfectionist. Some might call me "nuts," but I prefer perfectionist. I like to build a 97 Monte Carlo and have all the decals correct. The first time a tried to put a set of '97 Monte Carlo decals on what turned out to be a '96 Rev/Mon Monte Carlo, I decided it would never happen again. It took a year's worth of research and a lot of hard drive space, but I think I have gotten most of it straight.

What caused the problem is that Revell/Monogram doesn't give you a lot of data on the box or in the instructions. I made the mistake of assuming that if the copyright on the box was 1997, that the kit inside was a 1997 version of the car. Take a look at the Buck Fever/Racing Reflections (plastic by Rev/Mon) kit of the DuPont Jeff Gordon #24 car with copyright of 1997. The little emblem to the left states, "Daytona 500 1997." One mistake, one botched kit. The kit is actually a 1996 Monte Carlo. How could I be so stupid!

I am a builder, then a collector. Although my wife thinks I spend more time collecting which costs money than I do building which costs only my time. I only do NASCAR and only kits made by Revell, Monogram, Rev/Mon or whatever they call themselves this week. I have accounted for 207 different kits, of which I own 190.

Let me clarify one thing. Of those 207, some are variations of the same kit. For example, the copyright 1996 (95 T-Bird) kit #2477 of Mark Martin. There are two versions. One has Mark's picture on the front and one does not. I count each one as one kit. There are multiple versions of several of the early kits where one is the "Grand National" kit and one is the "Superspeedway" kit. As best I can tell, only the box and instruction wording are different. And then there is the 1984 Coors Bill Elliott that has four versions. I count each version as a single kit therefore the 207 total.

It took a long time to find a solution, and it is not perfect. I wasted a lot time. First, I scanned all the box covers and spent hours doing a visual comparison. A lot of "cut and paste" led me to one conclusion, don't use box covers to determine the year of the car. Qualifying tape on pictures of actual cars and the Rev/Mon interpretation when he built the kit for the box art can lead to dastardly errors. Then I scanned all the pictures from the kit instructions of the cars used for decal placement and tried making visual comparisons. I learned Rev/Mon does a lot of "cut and paste" from earlier years so they don't have to recreate the artwork. Again, not reliable for the perfectionist.

So I finally sat down and cut open every one of those 190 kits. (Does anyone know how much money I just flushed down the toilet by "opening" my entire collection?) I knew the answer had to be there somewhere. I started to do visual comparison and taking lots of notes. Then I bought Bill Coulter's book Stock Car Model Kit, Encyclopedia and Price Guide. I had a ton of information. Bill wrote a great book that helped get me started, but there are a couple of errors.

I had bodies, trees, boxes and instructions everywhere. Suddenly I saw something I had never paid any attention to. Rev/Mon had been kind enough to stamp most trees with numbers. Prior to about 1993/94, they stamped the kit number that tree would fit. Some trees had six to seven different kit numbers. From 1994 on, Rev/Mon switched to mostly using 4-digit numbers like 0610 and 0650, etc.

Now it was time to make the computer do a little work. I created an Excel file and loaded every single kit and every single number from each tree. I pressed the magical "sort" key and WHAMO I could see every kit by the actual year of the car, not just the copyright. Was I amazed to see how many kits were of different years than what I expected.

Below is a very simplified list of my data. What I found was that the stamp number on the window tree will give you the correct year in most cases. For instance the "glass" for the '95-'96 Monte Carlo is 2447 while the '97-'98 Monte Carlo uses glass marked 2523. As long as your cat hasn't dumped all your plastic into one large pile, this should tell you which year your kit will accurately build. Then watch out, because your friends will start to think you are "nuts." BUT, be careful because this list is not 100%.