Too much, too young: The Clash were about right. With a mortgage ensuring that what Easily Comes also Easily Goes, and with ACTUAL cars,  ones that I can get in and drive around, vying for slices of my monthly income, I’d have to be absolutely stark, staring mad to spend out serious dough on model cars. Toys, as my wife would dismissively describe them. With any luck I’ve got plenty of life ahead of me and maybe one day I’ll justify £300 for an Exoto here and a GMP there.
Or maybe I won’t. One thing that this series of Diecast Delights has confirmed is just how much absolute gold there is at the very bottom of the Diecast Heirarchy. Let’s take a look at one such model that won’t break anybody’s bank. Even mine.

I’ll wager that not every remaining 1:1 Sting Ray is as realistic looking as the image above. In photos this thing simply doesn’t require that disbelief is suspended very far at all. The dials are inset into the dash, the heater controls look like you could just jump right in and set the A/C just so. If you squint you can just about make out a tiny “Sting Ray” emblem on the dash in front of the passenger.
Wait ’til you see under the hood…

I gasped, I really did. It’s a 327, and when I saw that the rocker covers have the “Corvette” script on them, they became my eye’s focal point. I then spotted that the air hoses had aluminium jubilee clips picked out. Then I noticed another hose, with a braided finish, and that it led from a correct-looking Rochester fuel-injection unit, with the crossed-flags motif photo-etched onto it.
I’m not even remotely qualified to judge in matters of authenticity, ‘Vette-wise, but nothing under there looks cheap or fudged. It all looks remarkably convincing. Heck, in the above photo even the chrome windscreen wipers look alright.

Attention to detail seems to be a Maisto trademark. So many of their models seem to stand up to close scrutiny and are, therefore, ideal for people like me who know enough about a given car to judge it to be accurate. Of course, Mr Matching-Numbers would probably immediately spot three dozen glaring faults with the model- but they’d be the kind of issues that would be totally lost on the rest of us.
The fact is, to me, and probably to you, this looks a lot like a ’65 Sting Ray.

Yeah, it’ll do for me. I felt that there needed to be something by Bill Mitchell in my eighteenth-scale museum, and now I can tick that box, thanks to Maisto, having spent less than £20. It leads me to ask whether anybody really needs anything better.
Niggles? Well, the retractable headlamps, er, don’t. The stand-mounting lugs are far too prominent and there are lots of opportunities for further exterior realism where vents and ducts are simply cast in rather than actually piercing the metal. Oh, and the antenna is horrid. But I don’t think any of that matters.

This model successfully communicates the important features of Mitchell’s iconic C2 Vette, inside and out. For anybody with any Corvette interest, more pressing financial concerns and years before cashing in their 401K, the humble toy-store Maisto will stand in for that maybe-one-day AutoArt just fine.
(All images copyright Hooniverse / Chris Haining 2015. Want one of your models reviewed? Contact me via the masthead under “About”)