View Single Post
Old 7 Dec 2005, 09:10 (Ref:2243629)   #19
John Turner
Race Official
Veteran
 
John Turner's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
United Kingdom
Pontesbury, Shropshire
Posts: 13,203
John Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of FameJohn Turner will be entering the Motorsport Hall of Fame
I recently had the good fortune to speak to Simon Moore, author of two works about pre war Alfas, 'The Immortal 2.9' and 'The Legendary 2.3' which are the Alfa bibles for these models. I took the opportunity of raising the issue about authenticity of colours for these cars and in particular the 1938 Le Mans car. He advised that it is simply not possible to be a 100% certain of the correct colour shade of any car from the 30's, due to the constituency of the paints used since the aging process (as referred to by Dave, above) includes chemical reactions that alter the shade over time. Even where the original paint is found under layers of new paint or on some obscure untouched part of the car, there is no guarantee that the colour shade that you are looking at is the same as it appeared 60 or 70 years ago because it will still have been affected by oxidisation. Even early post war colour film will not help since different film brands would produce different shades of colour even where all the other circumstances (location, lighting, etc) were identical. The best we can rely on in these cases are peoples memories and, of course, not only does memory fade and play tricks on you, there are fewer and fewer people around who will have seen these cars first hand. The upshot of all this is that Minichamps have interpreted the original colour to the best of their ability. Although from a purely personal point of view, I would have liked to see a bit more red and a couple of shades lighter, because that's how I pictured it in my mind, who is to say they are wrong!
John Turner is offline  
Quote