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The packaging for the 5 pack 'Sonic X' mini collectable figues, released by FEVA in 2004. This packagine was only available in the UK. In America, Toy Island would release these as keychains in special packs with an action figure. Photo by grillcheese .

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Nightburnerz, Part 1: 2025's greatest HW five-pack

The 2025 selection of five-packs has been pretty dominated by the F1s, but early in the year I heard a lot about this set:

The Nightburnerz set comprises 4 licenced and one fantasy car, and where (if you're like me) most five-packs contain one or two cars you'd probably get if they were by themselves, but you don't want to pay for the others to get them, in this case every one of these is great. I still had a little pause - but then I saw that 5-packs were reduced to £7.20! Given they usually go for £11 and a mainline for £2.40, that's a pretty damn good price. I was never going to get the F1 set, I'm not a fan, and the Mattel anniversary one is not for me either, so this is the one for me. It's only my second five-pack ever, and with the single cars I got at the same time, it pushes my collection over the 1000 car mark! 1007 cars by my tally, and still going...

Going in order from top to bottom of the pack, first is the Sierra. The casting, a Ryu Asada design, represents itself on the bottom as an "'87 Ford Sierra Cosworth", which is part but not all of the story - It should read Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth. Also, the year 1987, lower ducktail spoiler below the whale-tail and central indent to the front bumper for an extra inlet slot below the grille indicates that this is the RS500 version, a limited edition of 500 RHD cars constructed for Ford and Cosworth by Aston Martin and sold in the UK only. The Sierra was Euro Ford's main large saloon car, its hot boi configuration was known as the XR4i (alongside the Escort XR3i and Fiesta XR2i); the RS Cosworth was a hotter version with a 2.0l turbo engine based on a Ford Pinto, and the RS500 an even hotter one, with numerous engine tweaks to make it raceable. Americans might have occasionally seen the Merkur XR4Ti on their roads and racetracks a bit earlier in the decade, a relatively unsuccessful and unusual attempt to sell a Euro Ford in the USA by beefing up and for some reason rebranding the Sierra XR4i ('Merkur' is German for Mercury), and the RS Cosworth adopted many of the components developed for the XR4Ti as well.

The RS500 was created for dominating Group A racing, which it succeeded at in touring car racing all over the world, although it was less good at rally, inevitably losing out to 4WD cars on loose surfaces; there was an XR4x4 but it did not use the powerful Cosworth engine. This one has Advan-style gradient stripes (my favourite flavour of racing decoration) of Ford-badge blue that look amazing, and the white Aerodisc wheels are a grand choice.

I have the first release of this car (debut releases are one of my focuses with collecting, since I think of my collection as being focused on design and each car as a piece of commercial art more than a toy, and the first release most reflects the original designers' visions for the car), which is a nice pastiche of a Texaco livery worn by a successful 1987 racer - and the Matchbox Superkings one I had as a kid - and skipped the rest of the releases. They were cool, but not that cool. I missed the white premium version with restrained and tasteful Ford racing stripes that was in the Canyon Warriors series. That was very cool looking and if I'd seen that at a sensible price I'd have snapped it up, but in all honesty this might be even better.

Next is the Maxima. This is a Nissan Maxima G910 estate from around 1983, modified for drifting with the rear bumper deleted, a window cut in the bonnet and a big, aggressive splitter. It's a really great casting that injects a ton of personality into an otherwise mundane everyday vehicle, like a budget DIY response to an Audi RS2 Avant, all early '80s angles and flat body panels with lovely bolt-on box flaring.

It's a car for real car people, who understand every car is special to its owner and holds the potential for greatness within itself, that projects like this are about perceiving that potential and actualising it; the kind of car that makes you wish HW would do something like this this with your old family car, or an old beater you have long parted ways with. I found a Speedhunters article here featuring a similar but less drifty car, with an RB25 engine swapped in, but I don't think there's an exact real-world counterpart to this car. A weird thing I just realised about this car, though: what's going on with the back doors? Has the rear box flare really sealed them shut?

For customisers it's a fun car to work on with the transparent bonnet allowing for engine detailing you'd not normally get a chance to appreciate, and this one has a chromed interior piece that will enhance the look of the engine a lot (I've not opened this yet, but I probably will). I have the first release of this car also; in fact I have two of them, because this car saw the debut of the awesome FC3 wheel, modelled after the Advan SA3R wheel, one of my favourite wheel designs (and featuring on the Gentileschi Delta in Deliverance Book 3 ). I wanted a set for customs, so I bought it again; the later releases featured a shakotan-style livery that didn’t appeal to me, and while the one in the Greddy diorama was the highlight of the set in my view, I wasn't really into the rest, so this grey/blue metallic one with "Hotto Hoiiru" on the side in Japanese is my third, but only the second design.

Next is the car that provides the artwork for the box, the Supra. This is a car with too many names: a 2020 Toyota GR Supra A90 (a.k.a. J29/DB, a.k.a. 5th generation) that wears a Pandem (a.k.a. Rocket Bunny) version 1 body kit. There's no mention of this kit on the car itself, but the kit is easily recognisable, flaring its wheel arches out even wider than normal and adding a wide wing to the back. Compared to the standard body version, this car has been released many times. This Ryu Asada-designed casting is one I don't have the debut version of, as I found it rather dull, but I got the one from the Slide Street premium series which had more personality, and later on a whim I got the red A80 and A90 Then and Now pair from 2022.

The contours are very appealing on this car, especially the broad hips at the rear, and I've always admired how the car evokes the 2000GT as well as the A80 Supra, even though I don't really feel that passionate about this car. This version is a really lustrous, sensual metalflake red that has a little iridescence to it, changing shade with angle, and suits a curvy body like this perfectly. Some black swooshes on the sides get a Supra logotype in that strange ugly Supra font that looks like a very old man's handwriting and GR badges (the decisions behind Toyota's branding are a total mystery to me, what was wrong with TRD?). A tan interior peeps from inside. This is almost a sexy car, and I don't often say that, I don't find cars and sex crossing over very naturally, but this and its flowing curves is the colour of spectacular femme fatale lips or racy satin lingerie. I think it's my new favourite A90. I still don't adore the A90, but I appreciate it fondly, and I'll defend it all day against the morons who moan because BMW worked with Toyota on the car and supply a lot of the parts - like BMW is bad at making performance cars all of a sudden? Anyway, newsflash, all cars are built with parts bought from suppliers, a lot of whom supply parts to multiple manufacturers. No Toyota is purely a Toyota, they buy components from dozens, maybe hundreds of firms. It's always been this way - or did you think Daimler forged all his own nuts and bolts?

Number four is maybe my favourite car of the bunch, the one and only fantasy car of the pack, the Dimachinni Veloce. Named for its designer Dmitriy "Dima" Shakhmatov, another man who enjoyed naming cars after himself and whose nickname can often be found as a sponsor decal, it's a car that naturally belongs in a group with the El Segundo Coupe and Glory Chaser, as an extremely credible chimera of European sports car racers, in this case a '70s Italianate wedge with British hints. HW have just about perfected the art of the Muscle Car chimera, but in recent years as their Euro and Japanese selection has grown, so too has their ability to use the design languages of these types of cars. The Dimachinni Veloce evokes Maserati Bora or Khamsin and De Tomaso Mangusta to me, a bit of Lamborghini Espada and maybe a pinch of Lancia 037 too, but seen alongside the Alfa Romeo GTV6 3.0 it bears a striking resemblance to that too, if one were to flatten the Alfa a bit (credit to Joe Eldridge of Ignition Diecast for this insight - his Yuuchoobe channel is a daily visit for me, an always interesting and entertaining place for collectors of little toy cars and a great exercise in zero-prep, zero-pretention, just-sit-down-and-speak-your-mind videos like Youtube was always supposed to be, and he has an epic archiving project happening too, collecting all the main line Hot Wheels since 1968 and showing each as he adds it to the archive).

And then there's hints of Lotus Elite or Aston Martin V8 sneaking in too. The rear view is particularly interesting with the intensely Khamsin-esque glass across the entire back of the car (compare below with my Kyosho Khamsin, a car I still can't believe I found in a Junk shop in 上田市), spare wheel and louvred window. The front meanwhile has the bonnet (complete with GTV6 3.0-like bulge) formed from the interior piece for colour contrast, which is especially striking here since it's chrome. The black with gold detail is a minor theme among this year's main line releases, with the BMW 6 series, Bentley Continental GT3 and Lamborghini Miura, and looks no less gorgeous than any of them.

This type of car is why Hot Wheels appeals to me, though - it's marvellous to behold the level of design ability that sees to the heart of an existing car design, can draw out features that can evoke those designs without copying them, and then integrates them into fictional designs that are credible enough that they can easily be mistaken for real cars, and do it with such verve and authoritative confidence. Shakhmatov also designed the Maxima, and many other great castings, but this is probably my favourite piece of his, and apparently he was most recently in charge of premium castings, but left Mattel in 2023.

My only other one of these is again a first version, a blue rally version. I never encountered the green Alitalia-looking version from 2023 but it's on the list, near the top.

Lastly from this pack, there's the Subaru. This Subaru Impreza GR WRX STI is a 2011 model, the last year that WRX was a version of the Impreza - the WRX became a separate model from 2012 onwards. GR in this case is indicating a widebody hatchback, the only available body for the STI that year. It's hard to ascertain since there are a great many special editions and so on of the Impreza, but this could be the second Cosworth in this pack. A Cosworth-tuned Impreza called the CS400 was made in a limited edition of 75 only, and to this day remains the hottest over-the-counter Subaru out there (there must be 1000-hp Subarus out there at this point, though those will all be homebrewed).

I was very unsure about the pink when I saw photos, I think pink cars are hard to do well without getting unnecessarily camp or tacky very quickly, but in person it's a lovely rich shade, warm and floral despite the metallic zing. A Subaru is a natural choice for pink, though, since the STI logotype is pink.

In the end my qualms about the colour match with the trajectory of my feeling about the car itself, though; I never used to be a fan of the Impreza hatchback and originally intended to skip this casting, preferring to stick to saloon-bodied Imprezas, but in fact this casting changed my mind and this pink one is my 5th Subaru hatchback. I unexpectedly received the yellow 2021 one as a freebie in a package of other cars from a seller on Mercari when I lived in Japan. I was delighted by this kind gesture and the car became a fond favourite, eventually getting rubber wheels, a roof sunburst tampo and a sticker-bomb tampo on the front bumper, an interior swap and even a cameo in Deliverance book 3, and getting me into hatchback Imprezas generally. Later I built this red 2022 lifted one with oversized wheels (filing the wheel arches was a nightmare, it still doesn't roll freely, but I'm still proud of this, isn't it neat?), and bought the beautiful metalflake navy colour variant. The fifth, the black one, is part of the 2019 Backroad Rally set, a collection I as a rally car lover felt uncharacteristically obliged to get all of.

That's all from this five pack, and from part 1, but not all from the Nightburnerz series. In part 2 I'll examine what 'Nightburnerz' actually means...

#diecast #model cars #hot wheels #japan #ford #cosworth #nissan #toyota #subaru #nightburnerz #5 pack #does anyone else feel like calling a car sexy is uncomfortable and weird or is that only me #1007

Nightburnerz, Part 1: 2025's greatest HW five-pack

The 2025 selection of five-packs has been pretty dominated by the F1s, but early in the year I heard a lot about this set:

My only other one of these is again a first version, a blue rally version. I never encountered the green Alitalia-looking version from 2023 but it's on the list, near the top.

That's all from this five pack, and from part 1, but not all from the Nightburnerz series. In part 2 I'll examine what 'Nightburnerz' actually means...

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