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[FINISHED] 1/18 Street to Rally conversion - UT Models BMW 318is

2K views 5 replies 4 participants last post by  TopGun 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Hello mates,
in this thread I will show you a street to rally conversion (again after my Ford Escort WRC), this time for an unusual car for rallyes... All we know the legendary M3 E30 prepared by Prodrive, but this car raced just in Italy from 1994 to 1998, always showing a great potential but with limited winning results...
The biggest problem was that the 318is was equipped with a 1.8 liters engines, while all the competitors (Peugeot 306 S16, Renault Clio Williams, Nissan Sunny GTI, Ford Escort RS2000) had a 2.0 liters, so more power and more torque... Although this limit Oral Engineering (leaded by the former Ferrari F1 chief engineer Forghieri) developed a rally version of this car to compete in the Italian 2WD rally Championship and was the one and only rear wheel drive car among a huge number of forward wheel drive cars.

I alwasy loved this car and when I found on eBay a UT Models BMW 318is at good price, I decided to use it for this conversion, so here is the donor model:



And here is what I'm going to release



So here is what needed:
  • Repainting of the body from red to white
  • New race interiors
  • New wheels
  • Decals drawing and printing (as usual by me)
I've already dismantled the model, stripped down the original paint and repainted the model and here is the result



In the meanwhile I've also drawed and printed the decals, choosing to make the 1996 Rally di Saluzzo version of the car, driven by Alex Fiorio (former 1987 Group N World Champion and 1988 Group A vice Champion), which scored a 2nd overall



After a couple of hours of work, the body was completely decaled:





More to come... Hope you like it!!!
 
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#4 ·
Hi all guys,
after a quite long period of silence, I show you the final state of this project.

I've found a damaged model of a 320 STW, always by UT Models, which I used to swap the street original interiors with the racing ones, already with rollbar and race dashboard:



I removed the original seat and installed 2 new racing seats for the rally interior:



After that I've started working on detailing a bit the poor original interior with cloth seat belts with photoetched parts, cables, a new fire extinguisher, metal pedals, a new scratch made hand brake lever:







The final step was to install a brand new kit of Speedline rims to complete the modification as it follows:





















Thanks for looking, hope you like it!!!
 
#6 ·
Thank you mate!!! Yes it's unique in 1/18th scale...

Actually in Italy we had a large number of 2 wheel drive rally cars and at half of the '90s they had a National Championship on their own (similarly to Fia F2 Cup) where this BMW raced against Renault Clio Williams, Peugeot 306 S16, Nissan Sunny GTI, Ford Escort RS2000 and others
 
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