NASCAR Models by Darren Drury!!

Hermie Sadler's 2003 JMU Monte Carlo!!

decals by 3 Amigos!

The car was delivered to my office in May 0f 2003 and we have been keeping it at my home while showing it at car shows, parades, county fairs, football games and other University and community related events. I can’t tell you how much fun it has been to take care of this car. For a race fan, it is a real treat. Many nights have been spent sitting around the car with a pizza in the garage and bench racing with the guys.

The primary JMU racecar was raced at Martinsville in the fall of 2003 and Sadler finished 30th in that race. The car I am in possession of is an ex Geoff Bodine Monte Carlo that was purchased by Sadler Motorsports and is the current JMU show car. After inspection, I have found numerous indicators that Bodine drove the car including seat brackets with his name on it. The battery from the 2001 Dover race is still in the car.

The car was delivered to us without an engine, trans and rear gears, but it still has been a lot of fun having a Cup car in my garage. We have tried to promote the car and the team as much as possible and hope to continue the efforts throughout next year.

While die cast cars were on the promotional list, they never came to be, so I really wanted to make a model of the car that we have, so I contacted 3 Amigos and we got to work.

I supplied Sam Lopez with numerous digital images of the car and various logos, signatures, scales etc. He did a great job with the artwork and after some adjustments, I approved the final product.

We then sent the artwork to Les and he printed the decals for us and sent a few for this beta build. I obtained the original JMU purple paint code and had some mixed and placed in a spray can. I used Testors gold for the gold spray. Just a note, the JMU purple is almost an exact match for Mopars Plum Crazy purple. I used a 2001 Dale Earnhardt Revell kit as the base. The masking was a little tricky, but after some test fits, I was able to get the desired dimensions. Two coats of each color were sprayed and then a light coat of clear.

Next came the decals. The stripes were a little tricky but were manageable. I ended up having to double up the car numbers and white stripes, as the body color was too much for the white to block out. The rest of the build went pretty well. I painted the chassis dove gray and pretty much just kept it box stock except for a few little items that I like to add such as home made hood pins, tire stripes, Earnhardt bar, radio antenna, fuel vent, etc.

I also made one side with black wheels as the car was raced with at Martinsville. The car I have has the old silver wheels that Bodine used to run when he had the Power Team #60 cars.

I wanted to detail the car more, but I was trying to get the kit done in order to present it to the driver when he made an appearance here at the University a few weeks ago. I failed in getting it done in time for that, but I still wanted to complete it quickly in case the race team decided to ask for the car back. My goal was to be able to take a few photos of the finished model along with the real car. I was able to do that last week and here are some of the photos.

I do plan to build the actual car that Hermie raced at Martinsville in October at a later time. That car was a Pontiac. I plan to detail that kit a little bit more than I did this one. I have a photo page of that car also at the links below. We were given pit credentials for that race weekend and hung out with the team for the event so I was able to get some pretty good photos of the car. We may even do a race-damaged version as he finished with some of the usual Martinsville battle scars.

Anyhow, I only get to finish a model about every 2 years so this one was a pleasure to do, as I could just walk out to the garage and check to see if I had things correct. Many thanks to 3 Amigos for the decals and making this possible. Feel free to view my other photos of the car at the following web link: http://imageevent.com/ded43

Also visit the team link at www.goteamva.com