At Motor Sport’s centenary gala in 2024, Formula 1’s most successful car designer, Adrian Newey, attributed the origins of his engineering genius to a 1:12-scale, build-it-yourself model of a Lotus 49, which was a Christmas gift in 1968.
“The car had all the right details, moving suspension, the works,” he said. “But more importantly, I was suddenly able to put a name to all the bits and pieces I’d later see on the garage floor. The lessons it taught me were invaluable.”
In the years since then, car modelling has become a gradually more niche and expensive pastime, with customers desiring a level of detail, inset, that can only be achieved by highly skilled artisans. But that is something that Pocher, a brand which built its first 1:8-scale model in 1966,…