#1074 GINGELL – BMW 323i CABRIO, FERRARI TESTAROSSA and PORSCHE CARRERA (Around 1993)

I have to admit, that, despite collecting toy cars since my childhood, I have no idea about most of these cheaper, made in China, brands that popped-up in the early 1990s. I usually get advice of Steven from the Motorcade, or I visit his webpage directly. 

The models themselves are rather uninteresting. Not bad casts, but lots of plastic, black windows and also bad tampographies (although I appreciate the racing numbers, as they help, or, at least, helped me as a kid, to organize races at home). The BMW seems to be a poor copy of a Matchbox model, but otherwise, there is nothing remarkable about them. 

The cars have been spotted in sets of many cars, and with different commercial names, but the company behind them is Gingell (Gingell Die-Casting Mfy. Ltd.). This company operated either with a big “G” logo or with a second logo that represented a rhinoceros, so Gingell is sometimes called Rhino, too (we will come to that in our next entry). Those logos appear in the boxes, not on the bases of the cars or anywhere else, so it is difficult to identify these miniatures loose. At HobbyTalk.com there are some threads that try to get a list of these models and investigate in which sets they were available. 

Both logos have been retrieved from HobbyTalk.com

Something noteworth is that the bases seem to be prepared to carry a pull-back motor, but this is not present in any of them. They do not have a reference number or any marking on the base other than "Made in China".

I bought these three cars together with other things, so I didn't have to pay for the shipping. The interesting part for me were the stickers placed over the roofs of the cars with the logo of Wüstenrot, an Austrian company for financial services, real-state and insurance. They were probably intended as a give-away to the kids who came to their offices together with their parents.

FACTS AND FIGURES: 

• Name:  BMW 323i CABRIO, FERRARI TESTAROSSA and PORSCHE CARRERA
• Scale: 1:64
• Year: Around 1993
• Company: Gingell/Rhino (China)
• Size: approx. 6 cm