Hot Wheels 1968 Datsun 510 Bluebird

Indeed often there is much moaning about Hot Wheels, but some cars in their line up are gems. I think of the Maserati Quattreporte, the B.A.T. 5, but also the often overlookked Chapparal 2D.

This car is a good case in point. Hot Wheels choose a subject not done often in any scale, had the wits to use this racing version, as they knew it is popular as such and made a racing interiour in it. An often overlooked detail in racing cars.

As it is, the chrome base is a tad to much for an otherwise cool cast. A different colour base and body would help it elevate to a 5 on most ratings. The open wheels are fantastic!

A lot of collectors complain about Hot Wheels' habits of adding unrealistic tampo decoration to cars, having rear wheels that are larger than the front ones, adding strange-coloured tinted windows and "slamming" cars with radical suspension lowering. (Thankfully, they now seem to have eliminated the "tooned", "Hardnoze" and "fatbax" models of super-distorted models from the range entirely.)

However, the Datsun 510, a new casting for 2009, is proof positive that when HW gets it right, they can really get it right.

Beloved of many sports car racers in the US as a poor man's BMW 2002, the Datsun 510 has become a thing of legend, but was not widely modelled even when it was new. The HW casting captures the car's lines perfectly, and with just the rims plated in chrome, the FTE wheels (which are the same size all round) look perfectly OK. The interior detail, with rollbar and racing bucket seats, is fantastic.

The only place the car loses a couple of points are on the chrome-plated baseplate, although with the fairly-dark colour paint, it's understandable why this has been done, since a black grille would likely not stand out enough, even though the real-life racing versions mostly had matt-black grilles. Unfortunately, this does mean that we wind up seeing some rather incongruous chrome inside the wheelarches, courtesy of the open-spoke wheels. Still, this is a minor nitpick, and hopefully we'll see a white or similarly light-coloured version with unplated black plastic baseplate soon.

The tampos are pretty decent too, suitable for the car, realistic and not over-intrusive. As is often the case with HW, though, they do have a tendency to be a bit off-centre. A non-racing-number version with red-tampo'd tail lights would have been nice, but this is primarily a toy and the racing numbers probably make it more attractive to kids.

Still, these are all minor points- overall this is an excellent model and exactly the sort of thing HW should be doing!