NASCAR MODELS by MR NASCAR

TODD BODINE'S 1998 BUD SHOOTOUT PONTIAC


Although the saga of Todd Bodine and TABASCO in 1998 is slowly receding into NASCAR obscurity, he managed three different colour schemes in his brief tenure. What we have here is the one-time colour scheme he used in the BUD SHOOTOUT, known as the "Bottle" car. To my mind, this was the most striking of the three schemes, and one I lusted after (modelwise, of course...) as soon as I saw it. No decals ever appeared, and I moved on to other things... until Sam Lopez sent me this file, and one for the "Green Sauce" car. Wow... these two immediately became "must builds"! (If you stretched all my "must builds" end-to-end... guess this was a "REALLY must build...)

The "TABASCO FIASCO" has already been documented here, with models of Todd's regular 1998 ride, that he hung onto until mid-1998, when he was replaced with Darrell Waltrip, whose one-race wonder Monte Carlo has also been covered here.

The 1998 Bud Shootout was won by Rusty Wallace (remember the "Adventures of Rusty" car?), with drafting help from brother Kenny (Square D "lightning" car...). Todd started the "Bottle" car in 6th, and finished 10th. Not a bad start to the year - he'd made the race thanks to taking the pole in the final 1997 race at Atlanta, where he debuted the TABASCO colours... but it was all downhill from there in 1998 for Todd and Team Tabasco...

The model shown here is, to the best of my knowledge, the first plastic kit-based model ever built of this car. Again, thanks go to Sam Lopez for the incredible graphics, and Alex Kung, for his invaluable technical guidance thru the ALPS printing process. The decal was printed on clear decal paper from Tangopapa Decals, first two layers of white undercoat, followed by the colour images, then two coats of MicroScale decal film, applied thru an airbrush, after thinning 1:1 with lacquer thinner.

The model buildup itself was fairly conventional, with the usual oil lines, plug wires, Earnhardt bar, new exhaust dumps, valve stems, etc, added, as is my usual practice. The paint job was not especially tricky; the body was primed with PlastiKote white primer, sanded, then coated with a couple layers of auto touchup white. The dayglo orange (Canadian Tire aerosal sign paint) was applied, followed by a couple coats of TAMIYA TS13 clear. Black touchup lacquer was than applied via airbrushing, with a fogged breakline diagonally from the centre of the A-pillar down and back to the centre of the rockerpanel on each side.

Photos I've seen of the diecast version have the orange also on the roof between the roof rails, but my sole reference to the actual car that shows roof, front and sides, from CIAstockphotos, show the roof as black. (This is NOT a car with a lot of reference info available!)

All decals on this car were in the files Sam sent, except the fender contingency, headlight and grille areas. These came from various old RaceScale and SLIXX extras I had in the war wagon. I had to play with sizing of a couple images a bit, to match my reference photo... learned a lot about the layering functions in Adobe Photoshop!!!

My first decal attempt gave me very good results on the bottle, flame areas, and all lettering over black, but there was severe bleedthru of the orange in the hood decal, and the underlying bottle/flames on the side numbers. I had to reprint a set of decals and start over (life is hard.....). To remedy the bleed/showthru on the next attempt, I printed up an extra layer of the white undercoats for the diamond on the hood, and the side numbers, and applied them first, over the orange hood, and the flames/bottle on the sides, then followed by the graphics decals, effectively giving FOUR layers of white in these critical areas! The decals are thin enuff that this was not a problem... Once I'd completed the decalling, I gave the body a day or two to dry, then sprayed several LIGHT coats of TAMIYA TS13 clear, from the rattle-can, heated in hot tap water. The body was then polished with Turtle Wax, and I was done. Sam done good - he really nailed this one!

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a different look to the nose of this car, compared to the regular RevelloGram Pontiac stockers. Following up on a tip I read in Randy Ayers' NASCAR MODELING FORUM (sorry, contributor name has escaped me...), I tried grafting the front valence from the first series (95-96) Monte Carlo kit to the GP, to get a more vertical, flush look. Not too bad... now I got a use for that old carton of WCW kits... The actual detail in this kitbash is in another page on the site - access it here.

And now I have three versions of the TABASCO FIASCO cars. How odd... so many graphics, so little on-track significance... but Sam keeps tempting me, and I keep risin' to the bait...

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