diecastAUDIO

Every now and then I’m amazed where the hobby of collecting diecast cars has taken me. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to some great places and meet some of the coolest people in the hobby. One of the folks I’ve been fortunate enough to be-friend over the course of the last few years is the talented and very down-to-earth Eric Tscherne. If you aren’t familiar with Eric or any of his many accomplishments in the diecast industry, then I suggest you check out the Saturday Nitro interview we did last year. Its a great listen and will definitely get you up to speed.

Diecast designers come up with a tremendous number of designs that unfortunately are never selected to become real castings. Its been many years since Eric moved on from his design position with Mattel and the Hot Wheels brand, yet one of his original designs has seemingly come back to life as part of the 2010 Hot Wheels line-up. Eric recently sent me his account of how this design has come full circle and is now becoming a reality. I’m sure you’ll agree, its a really interesting read. Enjoy!

The new Dodge Charger Drift Car that Hot Wheels is producing as a 2010 New Model is actually one of my designs! I originally designed the car at Mopar’s request. BJ Birtwell, then with Chrysler as a youth marketing person, called me up on behalf of Shaun Carlson and NewFormz to design their new drift car. This was in 2005. The guys, including driver Samuel Hubinette, wanted to do something with the Charger to make it more aggressive and unique. Originally they had asked for a wide body design which you can see in my drawings. Through that process however I kept coming back to the SRT-8 body and especially the hood. The 2005 show car was before the release of the SRT-8 so things like the hood were unavailable for the 2005 build.

The NuFormz team eventually migrated over to an SRT-8 body but the paint scheme remained. Shaun Carlson had raced for Mopar for years dating back to his Dodge Neon front wheel drive dragster (a Hot Wheels car I worked on while at Mattel). He had recently been running Pro-Stock for Mopar for Don Schumacher’s team with legends like Allen Johnson. Shaun had expressed bringing over the cool Colored camo designs of the Pro-Stock cars asking for something a bit different and in Mopar Blue. I designed a camo that had Mopar script and "M" icons interlaces with a traditional camo print.

At the time when I was designing the show car, I was also working on the Foose diecast line. At toy fair I was with Chip and we were talking about various projects and I found out that Chip was going to do the wheels on the Charger show car. It was mind blowing to me that we had both been working on the car but unaware of the other’s involvement even though we had been working on the diecast line for months! Some of the build of the show car was captured in a documentary, Drift The Sideways Craze that aired on Discovery’s HD Theater and TLC.

At the Super Convention Phil Riehlman and I got to talking and he told me Jun Imai had handled the Charger project for Hot Wheels. Jun is super talented and it shows in his work. The Charger came out beautiful. It is really cool to see my design end up in the Hot Wheels line some 5 to 6 years after I left. I now know how it must feel for other artists, designers, customizers and race car drivers to see their design turn up on a toy store shelf when it wasn’t the original intent. It’s a honor and a privilege.

- Eric Tscherne

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