MOLOFS In. Mintature

Amalgam Collection makes model cars as detailed as the real things. Mark Smyth visits its Bristol workshop to see the artists at work

Everyone loves a good car collection, even one that's a fraction of the size of the real thing. And by that we don't mean in terms of number but in scale. Whether they're Dinky Toys, Hot Wheels or carefully assembled Lego Technic kits, many are as precious to their owners as the real deal. When they're worth more than £50,000, probably even more so.

That's the cost of some of the scale models made by Amalgam Collection, a company hidden away in a Bristol industrial estate that makes probably the most exquisite and expensive model cars you've ever (well, more likely never) seen.

These include a 1:4 replica of the Mercedes-AMG W11 EQ Performance from the 2020 Portuguese Grand Prix and a model of the 1971 Porsche 917 from Daytona for which the client has provided such detail that they could only have been a race engineer or even the driver. Elsewhere, there are McLaren F1 GTRS, including one that looks exactly as it did when it finished the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1995, complete with peeling stickers and stone chips.

It's the kind of workshop you could spend all day in, watching as one model maker weathers a historic racer, while another restores the luminescence to the paintwork of a Scuderia Ferrari machine or applies tiny carbonfibre-weave decals to a Mercedes Formula 1 car.

There's even a Supermarine Spitfire created for architect Norman Foster, well known for his love of car design. He also commissioned Amalgam to make him a model of the Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion.

That's a pub quiz answer right there. It's a car by which Foster is so fascinated that he bought one of only three prototypes to have been made.