OK I am all in for Speedweeks, specifically NASCAR. In my stash of unbuilt kits I found four unbuilt NASCAR cars:
The three Monte Carlos are untouched; the truck was just barely started with a litte paint on random parts but nothing's been glued together yet. I think I'm going to build one of the Montes. I got a pleasant surprise in the bottom of the Kellogg's car box, at some point I treated myself to a $8.99 sheet of better NASCAR identity and detail decals.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the kit at some point got wet, and adhered to the above packaging is the original decal sheet for Texas Terry's effort, and I have my doubts whether it's salvageable. On the other hand, I wasn't planning on using OEM decals regardless.
As I was investigating decal kits, I found out that some decals require one of two bodies used on the Chevy kits. Early Montes had rounded bottoms of their doors, while the later kits were slab-sided. I forget when NASCAR made that change. I do remember when the change started happening with Busch North teams, and it took a long time before I didn't detest the slab-sided doors. Back to the subject at hand, I caught a break since I have two slab-sided bodies and one rounded doors, so I'm covered regardless of what decals I get.
I looked at a lot of '95-99 NASCAR results to see if any paint scheme from the area caught my eye, and one did. I liked the look of the Steve Park Pennzoil #1, plus I was a big fan of Steve even when he was in the Modifieds, and I even got to work with him in my last couple years in Busch North or whatever they called it in '07-08. A nice plus is that the Pennzoil car wouldn't require a ton of masking and spraying multiple colors, which appealed to my meager skills in that department.
There's a wrinkle to the Pennzoil car, though. The only decal sheet I can find for that is for the '00-02 Monte Carlo. It's essentially the same paint scheme that Park drove in '98-99. The bodies for the '00 don't seem to be *that* different than the '99s, at least not in any place where it affects the decals. I have a hunch that I can make the '00 decals work on a '99 body, even if it means clipping the Pennzoil logo out of the hood decal and just painting the hood under it.
While I debate that, I have some other options. I found a couple other decal kits for cars that I found attractive, and are meant for '99 bodies, though they're Busch Series cars and not Winston Cup cars. Busch Series cars were smaller (105" wheelbase vs 110" for Cup cars), but to my knowledge they didn't make Busch Series model kits, so I'm kinda assuming these Busch decal kits are designed to go on Cup bodies and nobody will be the wiser. As a Modified fan, I was also a big fan of Mike McLaughlin (#34), and I like that those decals don't require any secondary paint on the body. The Joe Nemechek Bellsouth car is a wild card: I can probably pull off that two-tone and wind up with a pretty wowee finished product, but I have no real fandom of Nemechek or Bellsouth.
The wife tried to make it easy on me to build the Steve Park car, saying "just get the right model for the decals" but that's not Parsimonious. I'll probably wind up building the McLaughlin car for this month and weigh my options for the other kits down the road. I know I'm not really up for the masking/paintwork needed to pull off the original Kelloggs or Dupont cars.
