NuNu of Macau in cooperation with Platz of Japan offers an interesting assortment of European and Asian racing cars in their range.A recent release and the subject of this review is their new Volvo S40 as raced in the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) of 1997. The kit includes a body and six parts trees molded in white plastic, a tree of chrome parts, a tree of clear parts, soft rubber tires, polycaps, several sheets of decals, a sheet of window masks, a black and white instruction booklet, and a full-color decal placement guide. The parts and decals are protected in plastic bags.

The body is cleanly molded. Most mold parting lines are subtle and fall along panel lines. One mold parting line falls on the frond edge of the hood and on my sample formed a slight step that needed a little filler to smooth out. After I primed my body, I noticed some very slight undulations in some body panels. If you plan on sanding your paint job you will want to level these out before proceeding to color coats. The kit parts are generally well molded but there are some ejector pin marks. These marks are in inconspicuous places such as the back of the seat and the inner surface of the roll-cage.

The instructions are clearly illustrated and easy to follow and include text in Japanese and English. Painting call-outs are for Mr. Color paints, and there is a table listing equivalent Aqueous Hobby Color and Tamiya paints.

Construction begins with the interior. Decals are provided for the instrument panel and the controls on the center console. The center console has raised details to depict the switches and knobs. I was worried that I would have trouble getting the decals to conform to the raised details so I made small slits in the decal so the raised details could poke through. I then touched up these spots with paint. Seatbelts are provided by decals. Rather than applying the decals directly to the seat I left them on their paper backing and cut them out with a knife. I painted the edges of the paper blue and carefully bent them around a needle.I used PVA glue to attach the paper belts to the seat.

The cabin floor is made up of two pieces (F1 and A3). When building the cabin floor and roll cage make sure that you are thorough with parts clean-up and that parts are fully seated where they need to go. There will be very little room between the roll-cage and the roof of the car. The instructions have you finishing the roll-cage in step four and then installing it on the floor in step five.

The roll-cage is a lot easier to build if temporarily tack the sides (C11 and C12) in place on the floor to hold everything in correct alignment while building. When installing the dashboard, it’s easiest to add it to the roll-cage before gluing the roll-cage to the floor.

Don’t glue the dashboard to the roll-cage, leave it loose until the next step. There are small tabs on the dashboard that will fit in notches on the side panels (A1 and A2) that will be added in the next step. The side panels (A1 and A2) are not an exact fit to the floor. I needed to remove a little material from the front lower corner of each to get them to fit properly.

The chassis has good molded-in detail. Only the bottoms of the engine and transmission are depicted. Since the hood doesn’t open and the engine and transmission are protected by a skid plate, this detail is mostly invisible on the finished model. When attaching part B11 make sure you remove the shaded areas shown in the instructions so that it clears the exhaust pipe.

In step 10 the instructions call for painting the front hubs and brake calipers a mix of copper and silver and the rear hubs and calipers silver. I assumed that this was an error, and I painted both the front and rear parts with the copper/silver mix. The wheels are held on with polycaps. The polycaps are a very tight fit into the suspension and the axles are a very tight fit into the polycaps. I didn’t mask these areas as I was painting, and I had to sand the paint off these areas to get the parts together without using a lot of force.

The vents (F14 and F15) that fit to the back edge of the front bumper have flash and parting lines that need to be cleaned up for a good fit. Conveniently, the clear parts fit from the outside. The windshield and rear window were a snug fit on my example, scraping off the mold-parting line around the edge and lightly sanding helped the fit.

NuNu provides pre-cut masks for the exterior and interior of the cabin glass. Be careful removing the mask from the paper backing, when I tried to peel up the edges sometimes the top layer of paper would come off with the mask.

The headlights and taillights are provided as chrome-plated pieces that insert from the interior of the body. I had to scrape away the chrome and mold parting lines around the edges of these parts to get them to seat fully. The interiors of the taillight lenses need to be painted transparent red while leaving the center of the lenses clear. It would have been nice to have masks included for the un-tinted areas but since there is a raised edge around these portions of the lenses, it wasn’t difficult to cut my own masks.

If you like applying decals, then this kit is good for hours of entertainment. The decals are in good register and are sharply printed. The decals give you the option of building the #3 car of Rickard Rydell or the #11 car of Kelvin Burt. If you build the #3 car, the unused windshield decal can be used as a source of blue decal for patching gaps in other blue areas of the car.

The decals worked well and were surprisingly strong and flexible. Decals are provided for just about every bit of color on the body. Some items depicted by decals (such as the chin spoiler and rocker panels) would probably be easier to paint. The chin spoiler has fourteen decals for the black and blue areas. Fortunately, the decaling job for the rest of the car is relatively simple. The black decals for the door handles were not flexible enough to force into the bottom of the recesses without pulling away from the edges.I cut slits in the centers of these decals and then touched up the area with black paint. The sponsor decals for the rocker panels (#78 and #79) are very long and thin and are easier to apply if cut into shorter sections. The big blue and yellow decals for the side of the car are meant to be applied with the rear bumper in place as they overlap it slightly.

If you are leaving your rear bumper off until final assembly, you will need to attach it temporarily for the decal work. The white areas of the race number placards (decals #25) are not opaque enough to prevent the dark blue of the graphics from showing through. If I were to build this kit again, I would cut out rectangles of white decal film to apply under the number placards. I tried painting white over the centers of the placards which helped a bit but the blue still shows through a little. It’s too bad NuNu didn’t leave a clear rectangle in the blue and yellow decals where the number placards are located.

The instructions indicate that both bumpers should be attached to the body before adding the body to the chassis. It is much easier to attach the body if you leave off the rear bumper until final assembly. The instructions don’t indicate whether the wheels should be installed before or after the body. When finished the tops of the tires will be tucked up inside the fenders, so add the wheels before the body.

This is a good quality kit that builds into an unusual and attractive model. I had a lot of fun with this kit, and I am grateful to Platz and IPMS/USA for providing this kit for review.