HOT WHEELS

The genius of the ever-popular Hot Wheels toys is that they’ve always offered a sort of aspirational caricature of the cars of your dreams. Sure, they’re tooled to closely resemble the bodies of the real things, but the wheels are generally slightly too large, the ride height slightly too low; in essence, the project cars we all build are really just efforts to recreate the Hot Wheels ethos in real life.

There is, of course, another dimension to this scale-model genius. It’s not just the Corvettes and 911s and other fancy motors that get us all sweaty-palmed in the toy aisle; no, it’s the models of mundane and unexpected cars that are often the coolest. The Volvo 850s, the EF Honda Civics, the Mk5 Golfs, these are the most exciting cars to find on the supermarket shelves, for the same reason that we all made a beeline for them when the Gran Turismo videogame series first came out: it’s more fun to be silly with an everyday car and take it to unexpected new places. Anyone can lust after a supercar. It takes commitment and dedication to fall in love with a mainstream runabout.

So it is that we find Ian