It's taken me a really long time to get to 1992. I wanted to do all of the 1992 Racing Champions in one post, but there are so many cars and it's been getting harder and harder to find the time lately. So I'll start by showing the 3 different packages that Racing Champions used in 1992, then I'll just start with the cars from the first package and do the others in follow-up posts.
This starts my favorite 3 years in Racing Champions diecasts. This is the year they created new castings for the Chevy, Pontiac and Buick that finally looked pretty accurate and proportional. They would still have the black out windows for another few years but I think that is part of their charm.
I suspect the new Buick casting may have come out some time in 1991 from some of the old price guides that listed Bobby Allison's car in the '91 release that was only ever made in the new Buick casting that I know of. But it would have been the same as the '92 release so there'd be no way to tell the difference between the '91 and '92 car.
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In 1992 Racing Champions still didn't seem to have a strict annual design and release process. They didn't update the package at the beginning of the year and the packages and cars still changed throughout the year leading to many variations. I haven't gone out of my way to try to collect every variation including every package it could have come in, but if I came across variations, I picked them up and kept them. The price guides also stopped tracking the packaging variations in 1992 and just combined all the cars into a single list.
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The first package was the same as the Petty-backed 1991. It has the #51 red car that looks like it was inspired by Bill Elliott's Coors Thunderbird. Part way through the year they changed to what the price guides called the copyright backs. They moved the driver list to the top and the copyright and licensing info takes up the rest of the back. Finally they updated to the Lumina package with an updated design for the red Racing Champions car. The back of that one stayed the same as the copyright back.
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One of the easiest ways to tell the new castings from the old other than the completely new shape is the rear windshields no longer have the 2 metal window straps going down the middle.
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You'll also notice that for 1992 they've also upped their game in terms of detail in the paint jobs of the cars. They've gotten a little more complex and are printing more details on the fronts and backs.
I'm not sure why but they also mix tampo and sticker details on several cars. I always assumed that they used stickers early on when there was some detail that was too hard to tampo such as a graphic having too many overlapping colors or needing colors that were hard to reproduce in tampos. Or maybe they also sometimes use stickers when they wanted to add details after the tampo was already created for the car. I'm just guessing on all this though.
For this post, I'll just look at the cars with the Petty-back packages. Even still there are 37 cars to look at not counting variations so let's get started.
This starts my favorite 3 years in Racing Champions diecasts. This is the year they created new castings for the Chevy, Pontiac and Buick that finally looked pretty accurate and proportional. They would still have the black out windows for another few years but I think that is part of their charm.
I suspect the new Buick casting may have come out some time in 1991 from some of the old price guides that listed Bobby Allison's car in the '91 release that was only ever made in the new Buick casting that I know of. But it would have been the same as the '92 release so there'd be no way to tell the difference between the '91 and '92 car.
In 1992 Racing Champions still didn't seem to have a strict annual design and release process. They didn't update the package at the beginning of the year and the packages and cars still changed throughout the year leading to many variations. I haven't gone out of my way to try to collect every variation including every package it could have come in, but if I came across variations, I picked them up and kept them. The price guides also stopped tracking the packaging variations in 1992 and just combined all the cars into a single list.
The first package was the same as the Petty-backed 1991. It has the #51 red car that looks like it was inspired by Bill Elliott's Coors Thunderbird. Part way through the year they changed to what the price guides called the copyright backs. They moved the driver list to the top and the copyright and licensing info takes up the rest of the back. Finally they updated to the Lumina package with an updated design for the red Racing Champions car. The back of that one stayed the same as the copyright back.
One of the easiest ways to tell the new castings from the old other than the completely new shape is the rear windshields no longer have the 2 metal window straps going down the middle.
You'll also notice that for 1992 they've also upped their game in terms of detail in the paint jobs of the cars. They've gotten a little more complex and are printing more details on the fronts and backs.
I'm not sure why but they also mix tampo and sticker details on several cars. I always assumed that they used stickers early on when there was some detail that was too hard to tampo such as a graphic having too many overlapping colors or needing colors that were hard to reproduce in tampos. Or maybe they also sometimes use stickers when they wanted to add details after the tampo was already created for the car. I'm just guessing on all this though.
For this post, I'll just look at the cars with the Petty-back packages. Even still there are 37 cars to look at not counting variations so let's get started.
