The MG Metro 6R4 has been a consistent feature in my life. It’s also one of the few vehicles that has invoked a constant yet shifting sense of fear.
When I started going to rallies, first as a child and then as a student marshal, 6R4s were in fairy wide use by amateur enthusiasts on local rallies. At that time, they were still new enough and fast enough to be winning rallies outright, so were usually first car through the stage. Standing in the dark forest or on the cold moorland, the distant rasp of a 6R4 engine carried by the wind was enough to tell you the stage was underway. The rising and falling of the metallic exhaust note, punctuated by blips of silence as the driver jabbed the throttle to wrestle the fibreglass beast round the course, left you in no doubt you were at a very dangerous and serious event. 6R4s were the last survivors of Group B, a class of car that killed so many people they were banned. For me, not old enough to remember the realities of Group B, passage of a 6R4 through the stage always carried a whiff of danger. Louder and boxier than the modern cars, with hoses and tanks sticking out above the engine, it felt as if the crew were risking their lives to keep up with the Subarus and Mitsubishis. I could never relax until the stones had settled and the 6R4 had cleared the junction I was standing at.
Many years later, it was a different kind of fear the 6R4 induced in me. For a car that had led so many words to be spilled and images to be posted on social media and internet forums, it took a remarkably long time for someone to pay the 6R4 the ultimate tribute of enshrining it in a 1/24 scale model kit. A small maker called Belkits eventually took up the challenge, and released the kit at a time which coincided with the rekindling of my interest in making models. And a remarkably complex kit it was. The model came in a deep box, with a high price attached. Plastic sachets of all sizes sprung out the box, revealing parts of ever-decreasing size and ever-increasing complexity. As someone who has made model cars all my life, it is rare for me to be intimidated by a kit, but the Belkits 6R4 managed it.
Before I got to work, I decided I also wanted to change the livery of the 6R4. The kit I acquired came with the decal set and guide for the 6R4 as it ran at the Monte Carlo Rally in 1986, the blue and white ‘Computervision’ colouring that represented mid-80s Britain: British Leyland, massive computers, and two English blokes inside called Malcolm and Nigel. As nice as it was, the matt blue and white livery, the subject of so many grainy YouTube digitalisations of old VHS videos, was a bit … common for me. If I was going to put a lot of time and effort into the model, I wanted it to be something a bit off the map. Yet at the same time, I also needed to find a set of decals that were going to be good enough to do an expensive and complex kit justice. None of the ‘regional’ 6R4s that I really wanted to make from the Scottish forests – Reay MacKay’s burgundy and gold car, Jon Burn’s yellow long wheelbase machine – were available. But the red and white stripes of the Marc Duez Belga car were. It would be remiss not to acknowledge that Belga, as a tobacco company from Belgium, brings up connotations of some pretty unpleasant histories. But as a livery on a rally car, it represents the breadth of drivers and countries that used the 6R4 at its peak, to limited success. By coincidence, the Metro that Duez and co-driver Willy Lux used on the 1986 RAC Rally – C868EUD – was the same car that Malcolm Wilson and Nigel Harris (or Angel Harris if you believe the typo on the Belkits decals) – used on the Monte Carlo Rally at the start of the same season.
We’ll come back to those decals later. But for now, the 6R4 build also revealed another source of intimidation I had not encountered previously: Instagram. Instagram has a vibrant 1/24 scale modelling community, where – if you follow the right hashtags – you can find all sorts of terrifyingly brilliant people sharing pictures of their works in progress. A rule I quickly learned is that anything you think you’ve done well, there will invariably be a person on Instagram who’s done it better. Scale-sized garages, airbrushed body shells, tiny bespoke interiors – there’s always someone out there raising the standard. In the case of model makers from Japan in particular, the standard is raised to an almost impossible level. However, I also found Instagram to be extremely useful for two reasons. One, it provides inspiration. The fact there are folk out there in Saitama or Seville or South Carolina doing crazily good work means there’s a constant source of inspiration. Look closely and there are always subtle touches to learn from, things you can replicate even if you’re working on a small table with three brushes. Two, for a complex model like the Belkits 6R4 where the instructions are, in places, vague, studying the work of others is an invaluable resource to find out just how the hell you are supposed to assemble things. As the build started to come together and parts had to be fastened together, the amount of time I spent zooming into photos on the #Belkits and #6R4 hashtags increased exponentially. What I learned from this is that for some aspects of the build, there was zero consensus on the ‘right’ way to do it.
With the first 6R4s having been built nearly forty years ago and scores of them modified, maintained and upgraded by enthusiastic amateurs since, pictures of ‘real’ 6R4s on the internet weren’t much help in figuring out what to do either. It seemed every single car was assembled differently with different parts – and none of them were exactly the same as the car in my kit. But I did have at my disposal a very large and elaborate crib sheet, in the form of an A0-sized technical drawing of the 6R4 hanging above my dining table. This was an original British Leyland showroom poster, bought off the internet when I was a student and stored for the best part of a decade until I found it in a cupboard and got it framed. For everything that the instructions didn’t tell you how to do – and that was a fair amount of stuff, the poster became my reference points. Suspension mounts, manifolds, battery mounts. Where the instructions fell short, the poster delivered.
The Belkits 6R4 was a complicated build that required patience. And when I say that, I mean it as a complement to the designers for having such a wonderful eye for detail. The interior components – the cockpit and engine – were the most challenging yet also the most pleasing of all when one got them right. I remembered these well from my time as a rally reporter, peering in through the flimsy fibreglass door or through the little hatch in the window to get the driver’s feedback on the stage they’d just completed. A concoction of the aroma of fibreglass, petrol and sweat, noise from the idling motor, and blinking lights from the dashboard hit me every time. Watching these come together in 1/24 scale with every stroke and band of colour from my finest brush was exciting and satisfying in equal measure, and brought back memories of standing at the stage end, waiting next to the car for the driver to take off their helmet and balaclava and bark out a sweat-stained quote for me over the drone of the idling motor. Likewise, the miniature V64V engine became ever more aesthetically pleasing as the carburettors, exhaust manifolds and distributor hoses were plugged in – even if I did manage to muck up the alignment of the hoses on one cylinder bank due to not paying attention to the images I’d downloaded or the giant poster.
The red racing harnesses for the driver and co-driver seats proved to be a particular source of irritation. Each individual part of the harness had to be cut to length and threaded through a tiny metal buckle. This alone ended up being three days of work. Belkits provided a very stingy amount of red thread, so it was imperative to get each buckle threaded first time without spoiling or wasting any thread. The gaps the thread had to go through were also extremely narrow, and had a habit of shredding the red material if you didn’t feed them through perfectly. A lot of time was spent flattening the harness threads between my lips (yuck, I know, but needs must) to give them the best chance of sliding through without splitting or catching, which would necessitate slicing a couple of millimetres off and trying again. By the time it got down to the final harness (the left-hand lower harness on the co-driver’s seat, if you’re curious) there was absolutely no spare thread left. It took an entire lunch break to get 80% of the thread through the gap. I sealed the harness with superglue, trimmed off the frayed 20%, and slumped in my chair. It would fail scrutineering at an actual rally, but looked passable for a model.
Those tiny metal parts also had a propensity to launch themselves free from their frames with unprecedented aggression. A combination of a lack of spares in the kit to replace anything which went missing and a deep-pile carpet meant that I spent a disproportionate amount of time on my knees looking for stuff with my phone torch. The right-hand boot catch was especially keen to escape from its rightful place on the 6R4’s rear, on one occasion embedding itself vertically into the carpet and necessitating a forty-minute search. And then, not but ten minutes after I had tried to fasten it onto the boot hatch, it did the same thing again, this time disappearing for only fifteen minutes.
As the various body parts were painted up into various formations of red and white, the time came to start applying the decals to the kit. As above, to make the car a bit different to standard but also retain some semblance of quality, I procured a set of Belga decals from a shop in Spain that would print them up for a fee and dispatch them by airmail. The seller – presumably a chap sitting at a desk with a graphics package and a laser printer – did all kinds of 6R4 liveries, from the Ayrton Senna test livery to the Colin McRae Donegal colours and even the Ken Wood Golden Wonder crisps colouring used in Scotland in the 1980s. The decals were printed to a high standard, and arrived promptly in a stiff card-backed envelope sealed with parcel tape. The decals had clearly been drawn up off period photos of the car, because the number plate was wrong, spelling out C868EDD rather than C868EUD – a tiny detail, but a significant one for nerds like me that spot these things. The decals were also, in cases, a fraction too big. Most of the time this was fine, but for the front and rear spoilers, it meant some super-precise cutting was required to get the jaunty CASTROL and BELGA lettering to fit. With the decals being home-printed (at £35 a pop, this Spanish bloke with the laser printer must have really been raking it in), they were also a little on the thin side. I was fortunate enough to discover this early on, and made sure the base parts were well painted and primed beforehand.
With some precision cutting, I sliced the Belga lettering and logos out from the backing sheets as finely as I could, reckoning that the big red panels the decals came with would just look cheap if the colour didn’t match the body precisely. This soon turned into precision bleeding as I pushed the limits of what I could hold and cut simultaneously with my wife’s Japanese craft knife, but the result was worth it. Blood doesn’t show on a red bodyshell anyway. As far as possible I reused the standard decals, bearing in mind that this was exactly the same car – C868EUD – as the one the kit was based on. So it made good sense to reuse the number plates and parts supplier decals where I could.
With everything stuck on and fastened in place, after a few months of work on and off the 6R4 was starting to slot together. But before I wrap up, I’d like to offer some practical tips for anyone reading this who is actually making the Belkits 6R4. The fact that you’re reading this and have stuck with it to the end means you’re likely a more committed and skilled modeller than I am, but nonetheless:
1. You will spend a disproportionate amount of time looking for metal parts on the floor. Make sure your workspace has a clear floor, ideally without deep carpets or floorboards with holes. You may also wish to consider doing some yoga or pilates in preparation for stretching;
2. See that red thread they give you for the seatbelts? They really don’t give you much at all. Two or three moments of carelessness when cutting the belts and you are toast. Cut it in half so that you have the same amount available for each seat, and plan out what you are likely to need for each harness in advance. The buckles are a right pain as well as they are nearly the same width as the thread, so devise a strategy early for feeding the harnesses through the buckles, and hone it to perfection;
3. For painting guidelines and more detailed installations of smaller parts, the printed instructions that come with the kit are quite frankly rubbish. Photos you see on the internet probably won’t help either, because since 1986 every 6R4 that exists has probably been rebuit and refitted multiple times. If you don’t know what to do, have a look on Instagram (check out the #Belkits and #6R4 hashtags or just search Belkits 6R4) to see what others have done, and then just go with what feels and looks right to you;
4. This may have been fixed for later runs of the kit, but on the edition of the Computervision kit I got, there was a spelling error on the co-driver’s name plate. The decals read ANGEL HARRIS rather than NIGEL HARRIS. At first I thought this was a nice little tribute given that Nigel Harris was, as well as a great co-driver, part of Toyota Team Europe who lost his life in a plane crash during the Rallye Côte d’Ivoire in 1987. But sadly, it seems it was just a typo;
5. The V64V is a very tight fit into the chassis, perhaps too tight once the exhausts and the hoses are in place. Do a trial run before you fit it or paint things up, as you might want to cut a bit out of the chassis floor to give yourself more room. Make sure the hoses are well-secured too so that they don’t come loose. You may also want to cut away the rear bulkhead, which is unnecessary and, well, bulky, so that the vents in the bootlid look straight through to the engine.
After nearly forty years, the days of the 6R4 as a competitive rally car are drawing to an end. There are still a few brave souls who flog their 6R4s round muddy English airfields or venture out into the Scottish forests, their vehicles held together with fibreglass and replacement engines and 3D-printed parts. But for the most part, the 6R4s that have survived into the 2020s have been retired to museums and garages, cleaned up and returned to their original colour schemes to be brought out just once or twice a year for a demonstration run in front of spectators or TV crews. Perhaps unintentionally, the aspect of the MG Metro 6R4 that this model build captures best of all is the improvisation, ingenuity and heroic engineering that has been deployed in garages all over the country in the last few decades to keep 6R4s racing long beyond their intended lifespan.
The Zero Car 