Nicknamed the “Flying Scot”many years ago for his speed on the track and wearing his trademark tartan-banded helmet as he drove to win three World Championships. Now retired from racing, Jackie Stewart is still very much a part of the F1 world today and his “tartan clad presence” in the pit-lane is often in evidence during TV broadcasts!  In 1996 Stewart and his son Paul started their own F1 racing team and the Scottish tartan was very much part of the teams livery with drivers like Rubens Barichello and Johnny Herbert driving (mainly) white cars bedecked with the Stewart tartan.  This 1/43rd scale figure depicts Jackie as team manager from that era wearing his “pit to car” radio communications set and of course his trademark tartan hat and trousers.  The figure is a casting taken from a master which I originally converted from one of the wonderful Denizen range (a male spectator). I added the radio head set, long hair and sunglasses from Milliput and the microphone and comms wires from bent copper wire. The radio control box on his waist is from scrap plastic. Instead of just painting the figure, I decided to get my good friend (and multi talented) John Murphy to create a rubber mould from the master; and this is the first casting. John really does a fine casting job and he achieved a great finish by capturing all that nice detail superbly, so my thanks to him for all his hard work. Stewart seems to wear a number of different “versions†of the tartan so I did some checking and discovered that there are up to 60 different patterns alone of the Stewart tartan – not a lot of people know that! Anyway, from the myriad of sources I used, I found that one of the “versions†he wears is officially registered as “Racing Stewart†tartan – (how fitting!) the same version  used by the  Stewart F1 team.  I’ve just blocked in the rough skin tones on the figure and now that I know what the pattern looks like, I’ll break it down into shades and work out a sequence of how I might lay on the colours. So more on this later, Cheers,
