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NASCAR MODELS by MR NASCAR Martin Truex Jr's 2004 TACOBELL BGN Monte Carlo

Martin Truex Jr is one of the up and coming “baby guns”. He started in go-karts at 11 and in 1998, at 18, was running successfully in Modifieds, moving into Busch North in 2000. Four Busch starts in 2002 caught the Chance 2 Team's eye, and he ran a partial schedule in 2003 for them, getting two top fives in ten starts. In 2004 he was offered a fulltime ride in the Chance 2 BGN Chevy. The model shown here is his Bristol TACOBELL-sponsored car, in which he won his first BGN race in the Spring of 2004.

Sam came up with this set of graphics, a complete set for the car, including the unique 2004 contingencies, sized for use with the REVELL 2003 Monte Carlo. All I needed to do was track down the “common” contingencies for the fenders. For those, I used the excellent SLIXX 2004 contingencies sheet.

This was a pretty simple model to build, just a couple twists in the painting process to work through. I prepped the body, removing part lines and flash (minor, but an irritant...) and applied PlastiKote white primer warmed in hot tap water over the whole body. It was then lightly wet-sanded with 600-grit paper and a full coat of white (GM white touchup aerosol) was applied - heated again. The reason I used white primer was that although Sam has provided the bright violet strips for around the bottom of the car, they did not come up as bright as I wanted when printed on the ALPS printer. From pictures, this appeared to be a fluorescent violet, so I wanted a white groundcoat to allow me to spray a fluorescent violet, rather than use the decal, for added effect. After I had applied the violet, I let it dry a couple days, then came back with light coats of Tamiya TS13 Clear to protect the violet, and to allow me to mask off the stripe area before proceeding with the rest of the paint job.

The rest of the body is a deep purple colour and does not appear to have any flake in it. I had two options for duplicating it. First would have been to find or mix the correct colour starting with a deep blue and a deep red or violet. The other option I call "on-body matching" This is done by taking advantage of the fact that some colours are heavily influenced by the colour under them, and have a lot of showthrough. I took advantage of that property of TAMIYA's TS37 Lavender aerosol in this instance. I had started via Option 1, by applying a dark blue Havoline touchup lacquer that had been heavily pretinted with the TS37. (Originally I thought this would be good enough, but on the body the colour was still too dark and not violet enough, and I didn't want to start over making up a new tint.) When the body turned out to be still too blue, I followed up with a coat of the Lavender itself over the blue. The combination of the dark lavender-blue undercoat through the TS37 coat gave the colour I saw in reference shots. After a couple days to dry, I sprayed a coat of TS13 clear, to provide a smooth surface for the decals.

During the down-time the body was drying, I built up the chassis, basically box-stock, painted Dove Grey. For added accuracy, I liberated the ignition boxes from the roll cage and installed them on top of the dashboard on the right side as mandated by NASCAR for 2004. In passing, the lack of GOODYEAR decals in the kits, or of tampo-printed tires, is a royal pain! My stock of SLIXX tire decals is taking a beating!

Once the clear had had another day or two to dry, I applied the decals from the sheet I'd printed. I always start with the hood, roof and decklid decals, then work around the model, doing driver's side, nose, passenger side and tail. (The only logic is in the horizontals first, so you are not handling the model with side decals already in place, and risking damaging them when doing the horizontals...The rest is just habit...).

The final touch was to apply several LIGHT coats of clear (TAMIYA TS13 from rattle can heated in hot tap water) after decals had had a couple days to dry thoroughly. then polishing with Turtle Wax compound. (Note: The 3 AMIGOS sheet we have put together also has the "rookies" stripes on it. Sometimes Truex uses them... sometimes he doesn't... he did not on the Bristol car...)

The final result was a model I was pretty pleased with, of an up-and-coming driver's first-win car. There will be lots more to come. Martin is in line for the NAPA ride when Mikey's string runs out, and I think that he will give Dale Jr some serious challenges for DEI driver supremacy in a couple years or so!

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