Ola people

I need a bit of help here. I usually am roaming around in the dark corners of armor modelling and I have never in my live built a car in any scale.
Now I want to built one as a gift for a good friend of mine who has done a lot for me in the past years and he is completely crazy about the cars from the old days of racing. And his favourite car is the Blower Bentley.

Now I did a bit of searching online and have found two kits of the blower Bentley one in 1:32 from Airfix and one in 1:24 by Heller. And it is the kit from Heller I'm interested in.
What I would like to know is if there are people here who built the heller kit and what they thought of it. Is it a good kit? Also I'm interested to know if there is any AM stuff available for it. I tried searching but I don't know the brands and have no clue where to start searching.
I thought it would be fun to have it displayed on a piece of racetrack at brooklands in a bend with the sloped road but that requires also a figure of a driver. Are there any figures available of racers in 1:24? And are they available in the style of the 1930's like the Bentley Boys. Or should they be converted

Would love to hear about this. I want this to be a special piece.

Also for myself I'm looking for the 1;32 airfix kits for a future dio with a bentley and a bugatti. I already found out that those kits exist but that is for later.

I hope you guys can help since the modelcar world is an unknown one for me

With friendly greetz

Robert Blokker

Sadly, old(er) European cars are not really my strong point.

To my knowledge, there are no AM bits for the Heller kit from the usual sources...or at least none that I've found so far. To be honest, I haven't even seen this particular Heller kit in unbuilt form, so I can't begin to comment on molding and/or construction. I have seen a few built up at contests, though, and they looked quite nice. I don't know how much work was involved, but I can tell you that it looks like the kit can be made into a very convincing replica.

The Internet is filled with pictures of this one, though, so finding reference photos should be relatively easy (and free).

As for figures, I think you may find yourself modifying whatever you can find in 1:24 to fit your needs for this project. The only thing that comes to mind as possibly useful is the old Tamiya Campus Friends set from the mid-1980s. I will have to dig around the "model reference" pile to see if I can find anything else that might be worth noting.

Not much help, but it's a start.

-YL


EDIT: A few minutes browsing through some back issues of Scale Auto Enthusiast and a quick trip to Google turned up this and this.