Leigh’s Diecast Diary

It was the turn of Minichamps and Mondo Motors to send us new deliveries today.

From Minichamps, we received the next subject in their 1:43 World Champions collection, Nelson Piquet’s 1987 Williams FW11 (P870006WC), as well as the next 1:12 2007 Honda RC212V, Nicky Hayden’s (PO71069). I won’t point out how we have received it ahead of Hayden’s 2006 Moto GP Championship winning Honda RC211V (PO61069)!

We also received the next three 1:43 2009 Formula One showcars; the two Renaults of Fernando Alonso (DC29407P) and Nelson Piquet Jnr (DC29408P), and the Brawn of Rubens Barrichello (DC29423P). The latter is a sell-out on release with the importer, and is a limited edition of just 1,152 pieces.

Mondo Motors surprised us with their delivery of not one, not two, but three colourways of their 1:18 Pagani Zonda F! I was expecting it in grey (MD50092G) and white (MD50092W), but not in orange as well (MD50092O)!

The other new release from them was of Lamborghini’s new four door car, the Estoque (MD50095).

The last bit of news is about our next issue of ‘Diecast Monthly’. It’s not due to hit your doormats until this weekend, but it can be viewed online as of now! Click here to get to it, then just turn the pages!

Unsurprisingly, we had a flood of requests today for Valentino Rossi ‘100th Grand Prix win’ subjects from Minichamps!

I think a figure with ‘100’ flag has to be a given but, considering that Minichamps haven’t even confirmed any ‘standard’ 2009 Moto GP replicas yet, an announcement on this could be some way away yet. It would also be great to see that huge banner replicated which had photos of all of Rossi’s career wins on it, but I’m not sure how practical that would be, because even at 1:12 scale it would probably be over a metre in length!

The best news would be if Rossi was to run a special colour scheme in Laguna Seca this weekend to commemorate his fantastic achievement. He’s due one, as his last special was over a year ago now!

Anyway, in terms of present diecast news, CMC today sent us a pre-production sample of their next 1:18 subject, the Audi 225 Roadster in red/white (CMC075C). In truth, it’s not the most popular CMC replica we have ever marketed, but Audi have commissioned it to celebrate their centenary, so I’m sure they’ll have made it worth CMC’s while! As you would expect, the extremely high levels of detail more than match up to CMC’s previous releases.

It looks like July is going to be a big month for 1:18 sports car collectors!

First off, Mondo Motors will be releasing their (so far) exclusive 1:18 replica of the Lamborghini Estoque (MD50095).

Then, there will be quite a lot from AUTOart at the end of the month (but no, not the Koenigseggs)!

Their new subjects will include the Lamborghini Reventon (AA74591), classic Porsche 911 in blue (AA77913), Lamborghini Espada in red (AA74503), and Lancia Fulvia in red (AA74701) and blue (AA74702).

Long-awaited AUTOart restocks will include the Signature Collection Bugatti Veyron in black/red (AA70906) and black/blue (AA70907), and the Lotus Cortina (AA75331).

Thank goodness for rsync and backup servers - thats all I can say

This was the holding page copy

Summary

• Leighsdiary is down due to an attack on the servers ISP
• Data was backed up and should be able to be restored
• ETA for it to be back up Tuesday 16th June 2009 (edit obviously up on Thursday 11th) but check back regularly for updates
• Please be assured that GrandPrixLegends.com resides on different servers, with a different company, on a different operating system in a different city

Full story for techies

At 7pm Sunday night an attack was launched on the ISP that hosts the VPS that Leighsdiary sits on.

Support at VASERV spotted something strange on their network and as a consequence all VPS nodes were taken down pending further investigation

By Monday AM it became clear that the HYPERVM software was hacked and as a result the hacker had complete root access to all VASERV’s nodes. It seems the hacker was intent on causing as much damage as possible by permanently deleting files across the network of nodes.

I received an email from the node at 11:18 just before it was pulled down suggesting no data loss on the node leighsdiary sits on

With 400 nodes and approx 4000 vps’s to deal with, VASERV were overloaded with work. So much so, thay have had to sell the company to a bigger company in order to maintain customer satisfaction.

Early indications suggested the node we were on was restored although I could not ping it

Finally at 5:30 Wednesday morning the server the node was sitting on was pronounced dead due to partial data loss

Personally I feel that as I was receiving emails and the vps was restored early no hack attempt was made on our box

What I do feel is that the vps became corrupt during the shutdown period or it is not in the interest of the ISP to try and fix

Obviously I am upset this has happened but these things can and do happen. It’s part of web life

My real gripe is with the hacker who has not only given me a grief and left you guys without the latest diecast news and forum but more importantly brought a company with its employees to the point of having to sell and the owner of the software hacked responsible for this, committing suicide

Links

• Latest diecast news on twitter
• Vidcasts and Charlie fix
• News article concerning the attack
• News article concerning HYPERVM owners suicide

Jon

Today we took delivery of a very small number of Minichamps Valentino Rossi 1:12 Honda RC211Vs from the 2003 Valencia Moto GP (PO37196). This is the one with the ‘Austin Powers’ livery. It has been sold out for a good couple of years now, so if any of you out there need one to go with your pre-order riding figure (PO30186), you know who to call! Calling us is what you will need to do (0870 460 3456), as we’re not putting this on our website to ensure that we do not oversell. The price is £49.99, by the way.

We also received the much-anticipated Bauer 1:18 Bugatti Royale Coupe De Ville (BA001). It is absolutely immense, and the level of detail on it is astonishing. We only have a couple spare from this first shipment after fulfilling our pre-orders, so you will need to act fast if you don’t want to wait for our second delivery, which is at least another four weeks away.

At least someone at Minichamps must be reading this blog! Today the 1:12 Valentino Rossi 2008 Catalunya Yamaha YZR-M1 was confirmed (DCL2008). Minichamps’ code will be 122083096. Apparently the ‘Wudy version’ doing the rounds on Ebay at the moment is the 2007 bike in the Catalunya 2008 graphics.

This evening we leave on our Nuremberg road trip. Originally it was going to be an all-day drive tomorrow but, given the weather conditions at the moment, we’re going to leave half a day earlier instead to give us more time to get down there.

Check back this week for news live from the Toy Fair!

Following on the theme from Monday, diecast replicas seem to be selling out so quickly at the moment. Last year there was a definite shift where there was much less ‘spare’ stock after fulfilling pre-orders, and this year there seems to be less available still.

For example, the forthcoming 1:43 2008 DTM cars of Ekstrom (P081801), Tomczyk (P081802), Kristensen (P081809) and Scheider (P081810) are all sold out to pre-orders.

Kubica’s 1:18 BMW F1.08 (DC2804) sold out today, and the next 1:8 Valentino Rossi helmet (PO70896) is also sold out to pre-orders. I never thought I would see that happen with a Rossi replica, but that’s what’s happened.

Could 2009 be the year where pre-ordering becomes more essential than ever before?

Today the 2009 Grand Prix Legends Diecast Sale went live! You can click here to see everything currently in the sale, although we only have small numbers of most items so I imagine a few pieces will sell out quite quickly.

We also received sample images today of three of Universal Hobbies’ 1:16 forthcoming tractors, so they’re a lot closer than I expected. These are the Doe 130 (J2703), Fordson Supermajor ‘New Performance’ (J2780), and Ford 7000 with cab (J2798).

There won’t be a diary entry tomorrow as I’m off fighting crime (well, not really, but that’s more exciting than the real reason!), but normal service will be resumed on Friday.

Today we received some 1:18 Ferrari samples from Mattel.

These are the second colourways of the California, in the really nice Azzuro Blue (HW2043), and the Dino 246 GT, in yellow (HW2045). There were also samples of both colourways of the Ferrari 410; silver (HW2048) and black (HW2049), and the Ferrari 575M in red (HW2053). 

In other news, The Stig was supposedly revealed today as Ben Collins. That may be true, it may be a bluff. ‘Some say that he plays with Amalgam cars on the floor and, if he wanted, he could reduce the price of zinc with a click of his fingers’!

Today we received the new Minichamps delivery.

On it were the next two versions of perhaps the most used mould in Minichamps history, the 1:43 McLaren M26! These next two examples are Brett Lunger’s (P784330) and Patrick Tambay’s (P784308) 1978 cars.

Also on the delivery were two new James Bond releases; the Quantum Of Solace two car set (P121300), which is limited to just 3007 pieces worldwide, and Roger Moore’s Alfa Romeo from Octopussy (P120141).

We were informed today that CMC’s 1:18 replica of Phil Hill’s Ferrari Sharknose from the 1961 Belgian Grand Prix (CMC070) has now sold out. We will have one more delivery that will (just!) cover our existing backorders, but that’s it.

Even though CMC will still be replicating two more versions of the 1:18 Ferrari Sharknose, I was surprised that the Hill Spa car should sell out so soon after its release, especially given its now very high price of £225.10, and in the current economic environment.

So it looks like the credit crunch hasn’t hit CMC buyers just yet then!