Karl AKA Stroget is an active curator at HobbyDB of many of the 1/43 model car brands. He has been adding model cars to the DB since 2014; some of his favorites are Alfa Romeo and obsolete Tekno from Denmark!
I have already written a blog article on the French Dinky Guilia 1600 Ti released in the Atlas Deluxe Dinky Collection and it can be found here. The Dinky Guilia also featured in Robin Godwin’s articles about Guilia’s from contemporary toy producers which may be found here.
After producing the standard saloon car as #514 from 1966 French Dinky re-numbered it to #1401 in 1967, painted it red and added competition stripes, numbers and Tour de France Automobile rally markings. There are a number of other detail changes for this model. There is a yellow interior rather than red one. A black steering wheel rather than white. Additional spotlights on the front. And number plates, which were not fitted to the original saloon car. Otherwise, the car was essentially the same. Again the opening features were the bonnet and boot, and sliding front windows.
The Atlas model features a replica box which has lovely period artwork showing the car racing through the dark on a snowy landscape so forcefully that a wheel is lifting off the ground. This model was made in China for Atlas and is to 1:43 scale. The car was included in in the French ‘Dinky with parts that open‘ series but was not included in the UK Atlas Deluxe series, though there seems to be no real reason that they did not as DeAgostini still has a supply of them and are selling them on their Model Space web site which is how I obtained this one.
The model captures the car’s shape well as noted in the previous article and has nice yellow ‘gems’ for the headlights and rectangular red ones for the rear lights. The rally details are all tampo printed and are a good, if not exact, match for the originals which look like decals to me, and which are often damaged on the original models at the edges of the roof, bonnet and boot.
Although the Atlas collections have been closed down across Europe a significant amount of the stock still seems to be in the system with wholesalers in the UK and Europe having substantial stocks of most ranges now and they still seem to be receiving shipments from some central warehouse managed by DeAgostini.
DeAgostini themselves and Chinese vendors on eBay and AliBaba seem to be the major source of the Atlas Dinky models now. There must be a fair stock still in existence as the models are still regularly available.
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