A Model Museum
A MODEL MUSEUM
EXOTICA FROM RACING’S PAST PRESERVED IN PLASTIC
YOU MIGHT IMAGINE IT’S AFTER hours in a long-lost garage of the world's foremost cycle collector. Go ahead, check the supple suspension on that screaming-green Moto Guzzi V-Eight. Finger the delicate details of the 500cc Gilera Four. Or over there-the MV Four that carried World Champion Giacomo Agostini past so many finish lines.
They’re models, of course, a col-
lection that could fit on a tabletop-or, as Cycle World learned some 25 years ago, in a mailbox. That’s when the magazine started offering readers the chance to buy motorcycle models from Protar, an Italian company. Mail in your money and we would send you a boxed assembly of plastic parts ready to glue together.
Protar’s models were a showcase for the talent of one of roadracing’s greats: Tarquinio Provini. It was the Isle of Man’s notoriously fickle weather one August morning during 1966 that ended Provini’s first career and brought a second one to light. An unexpected flash of sunshine on a road usually wrapped in wet fog caught the Italian champion unaware, blinding him for just a moment-long enough to send his new 350cc Benelli Four into a high-speed crash. Provini awoke in hospital with a broken back and severely burned legs.
But his love and knowledge of racebikes was not to go to waste. Strapped in a hospital bed for the next year, Provini took up woodcarving and whiled away many a long hour of recovery with his new hobby. He chose as his model a subject he knew well, the 250cc Moto Morini Single he took to an Italian championship.
What began as a labor of love for a recovering racer soon turned into a thriving business when a German pantograph manufacturer used new technology to transform the wooden patterns into metal molds. Within a year, Protar listed six models in a line of plastic, injected-molded, i/9th-scale miniatures. For the time, devotion to detail was incredible. Each model was a faithful replica featuring suspension that actually worked, authentic control cables and fuel lines, even tiny duplicates of the original graphics. By the end of 1968, a new factory was built and Provini added models of Japanese GP bikes, as well as more Italian, British and German machines.
Cycle World sold thousands of the kits for S6.95 each, a very high price at the time, but one determined by low availability and a relatively limited market. We thought you might like a look back at this line of miniatures that preserves in plastic a rich period of motorcycle racing history.
-Joe Parkhurst
