Corgi produced a small range of accessory sets for their range of die-cast vehicles, to enhance the play value, and it's these we are going to look at now. Some of the poses were also copied by Hong Kong pirates in larger scales.
None of these are a complete set, and while I might have the missing figures elsewhere, I don't think I've got all of them. Basically they are a set of racetrack pit-crew and a race-winner figure, a set of spectators, the track-side officials and the press.
All around 35/40mm there were two main runs of these, one lot in polystyrene, the other in a quite stiff or dense PVC.
Another set of Mechanics gives rise to the main variants, as the chap leaning forwards with an oil bottle, becomes a grabber in the pit-crew, and a stand-alone spanner holder with some individual vehicle models - the turquoise one with the ovoid base coming with the Land Rover-based cherry-picker - if memory holds? With the orange boiler-suited chap being included in the big US style twin-boom wrecker?
By far the most common set, the garage (service station) mechanics turn-up lose on the sprue all the time and clearly there was a large reserve or out-painters stock kicking around at some point. I love the sheep-skin wearing salesman, come to give the mechanics a bit of his wisdom..."You see the thing is Martin...mending a car is rather like making love to a beautiful woman..."
Swiss Toni
These have that peculiar mildew type growth on them that PVC often suffers from, usually it can be cleaned-off without the product suffering any detriment, but presumably on a molecular level the material must have 'dried-out' a bit, or suffered in some other way, that might increase the likelihood of eventual failure?
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