Around 1986 Matchbox Int'l Ltd brought out an interesting Yesteryear theme on Grand Prix cars. At the time I was collecting I hadn't realized this theme yet and had only bought the Bugatti and the ERA.









the blue/yellow variant of the ERA is my latest. As is the Maserati.

There was also a Ferrari.

yes, just found that one in my book.

sadly haven't got it yet.

I believe the Bentley also belonged to this theme.



also interesting to note that my black ERA RIB was made in England, and the blue/yellow variant made in Macau

You will get one easy if you want.

A link to all ERA. The colors are autentical.

cheers, never questioned the colour scheme, got them in several classic racing books.

Of course ...

Appears to be the Bently on the box?

yeah, all the boxes were like that

I think the Bentley did not belonged to this group of racing cars. Somewhen i've got a little brochure about 30 years MoY (12 pages).

On page 6 is announced the release of the 4 racing cars in june of 1986 as the first 4 exemplar. Sadly this serie wasn't continued.

On page 5 is already the Bentley. This car was released in 1985. One year before they began the "Grand Prix Racing Cars".

Very interesting are three other facts. The pictures of the Maserati and the Ferrari are confused. All cars haven't racing numbers. And the color scheme of the E.R.A. is different with the later sold cars. The chassis frame is here also blue as the rest of the chassis.

"Matchbox Toys" by Dana Johnson say that the E.R.A. made in China are rarer as the same made in England.

The story behind these 4 racing cars (that did not really fit the theme of the 1980s MOY) is that Matchbox was looking at sponsoring a classic car race to run at all the F1 events.  Tooling for the 4 cars had to start 18 months before the first race, but by that time, managemant had decided it was not feasible and cancelled the race series.  They naturally tried to sell the original 4 cars since they had already been developed   [u]Collecting Matchbox Diecast Toys; The First Forty Years[/u], 1989].

Karl, this is very interesting. The story before the story.

Here is the Ferrari

From here the body and the exhaust look like plastic. I would assume the body is metal. Are the pipe and engine plastic?

The body is die-cast. The rest is sadly plastic.