Fujimum McLaren F1 GT BPR Marlboro Zhuhai 1/24. Build Photographs and kit review.

Fujimum McLaren F1 GT BPR Marlboro Zhuhai 1/24 completed December 24th, 2025. Build #157.

Background:

Awesome car. Awesome livery. Less than awesome kit, but I wasn't going to let that discourage me. Research material is hard to find on this one - it's a one-off livery for a race in Zhuhai in 1996, never to be seen again, it seems.

Kit review:

Pros:

Great subject and livery. Well moulded, little cleanup required. Fits together mostly very well. Doors can be made open or closed. Nice rubber tyres, clean clear glass parts, windows masks and a semi-engine at the back.

Cons:

By far the worst con: Ride height. Even with a lot of correction efforts applied, still too high. The car is derived from the road car kit and the road car version takes priority in moulding and other choices. It does have race car sills however for the decals but they're far too small and at the wrong angle. Doors are fiddly. Decals are incomplete (no tobacco logos) and where the decals do exist, they're sometimes incorrrect - putting David Brabham with an American flag; BMW logos with no blue in them, but for two examples. Lots of masking required. Doors are initially flimsy and there's not a lot of glue contact points for glass.

Verdict:

It's a pretty good kit but that is all. I would call it a kit that in assembly is not as good as it looks when you open the box, and not as good as the engineers think, but it's certainly pretty good.

Build notes:

Completed on Christmas Eve 2025 after about 10 or 11 weeks of building. Changes to the kit - corrected the sills with new larger ones. Lowered the ride height. Added 3rd party decals made for this particular car to fill in or correct Fujimi's dodgy decals. opened up one of the rear vents. Detailed the engine. Detailed the interior. Attempted and abandoned the idea of having the doors able to be both open and closed.

Dual Build:

Making two very different cars from the same manufacturer in the same livery as each other was an interesting dual-build, and it makes photography more interesting too. There are a number of pics here with the F1 GT as the lead car, and vice versa in the set of MP4/4 photos.