This one came rather unexpected I guess. It's the Red Bull RB7 driven by then Toro Rosso driver Max Verstappen at the skiing venue in Kitzbühel, Austria. This was part of a promotion campaign for the Austrian GP (at the Red Bull Ring) later that year and another chapter in the book of the Red Bull Racing Live Demo team. They have brought F1 cars to some extreme events and even had a snow run before in 2010 with Sebastian Buemi in Canada.
But this was the first time it was in the mountains at 1600 meters of altitude and the first time they put snow chains on an F1 car. Max Verstappen was drafted by Red Bull to do the driving to get the maximum publicity out of it.
For me it is also kind of a special model as the 14th of january (when the Snow Run took place) is also my birthday!
Minichamps pretty much immediately announced they would release a model of the event and is due for release anytime soon. As usual the Verstappen webshop released the same model a few weeks before, but in a special packaging and in more limited numbers. This release is edition 7 from the official fanshop.
The model comes in a flip-top box. Minichamps have been using this before on some Schumacher, Vettel or Senna specials. The box art is quite nice with the Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen logo's. On the box is a picture of the car running in the snow. The car in the picture is not the real car though but the model. Don't know why they didn't just use a picture of the real car, pretty strange that, although I noticed Spark does the same with their 1:18 F1 car box art...
On the right side there is also a hologram sticker with the Max Verstappen logo in it, which is pretty cool.
When the top is open, the first thing you'll notice is of course the model and the chains on the wheels in particular. They are real metal chains, which is nice. I was afraid Minichamps would make them out of plastic. The car itself looks pretty nice with that different livery, especially the sidepods with the 'ice' on it. The back of the top shows the same picture that is on the box and a bit of information about the event. Looks good so far...
The model itself then is basically the standard RB7 that Minichamps released back in 2012. It's not near as detailed as their more recent releases, so it's a pretty basic model with some extra details. The main feature is of course the wheels. I'm happy they used a real rain tyre tread and it's pretty nice to see those blue Pirelli sidewalls. As I mentioned above, the chains look pretty good and down to scale.
The one-off livery looks pretty good aswell as does the helmet of the driver figurine. The cockpit is not as detailed, but that's ok.
But now I'll have to talk about the least favourite things about this model and first thing is the level of finishing. I know it's based on the standard Minichamps RB7 release, but they didn't even keep the same level of detail on some levels. For instance the Red Bull Racing logo on the nose. I've put the Sebastian Vettel RB7 next to the model to compare. The logo from the newer release looks as if it's an 8bit version of the former. Incredibly shoddy work! I'll put the difference in shade of yellow down to the fact that it's a slightly different livery and Red Bull could be using darker yellow now.
There are some more things like the Go Pro camera's that are missing, and some more details here and there. I understand the level of detail is not as high as a resin model or as the newer releases, but they even went backwards compared to back then. Another thing is the shape of the front wing pillars. Somewhere mid-2011 Red Bull changed the pillars from a swooping shape to a more straight version. The standard Minichamps release of the RB7 had those swooping pillars as it was based on the Chinese GP of that season, which was at the beginning of the year. The later release of the race specific Japanse GP at the season's end had those straight pillars.
Now the Snow Run car had those swooping pillars, so why the HELL did Minichamps use the later version of the car with the straight ones??? They have the moulds for both versions, why no use the correct one?? Must be hard doing research!
Then there is the price. The webshop edition was a whopping €250. All 500 pcs. they had sold out within hours. I bought one too (apparently) but that was pretty ridiculous. It's because I'm a sucker for having a complete collection.
Even the standard version Minichamps will release at the end of the month is still around €150. I understand they are milking the Verstappen cash cow, but this is just ridiculous. I don't mind paying €250 for a model, as long as it's nicely detailed and they have put a lot of attention and research in it. Now I get a recycled, incorrect model with less detail that a cheap standard version with one added extra and a "fancy" box that doesn't even have a picture of the real thing on it.
My only consolation is that there are a lot of Verstappen fans who missed out on this release, so in case I'd want to part with it I'll at least could get my money back from it...
