released in May 1992
rereleased in August 1999
rereleased in June 2004
This kit depicts the famous 787B nr.55 that was driven to overall victory in
the 1991 Le Mans 24hrs race by Johnny Herbert, Bertrand Gachot and Volker Weidler.
A fully detailed kit, this must be the nicest kit Tamiya made sofar of any Mazda.
Although the doors are molded shut with the front body, the interior and monocoque
details are so good that you'd be very tempted to cut open at least one door.
Fortunately, the engine cover does come separate so the well detailed engine and rear
suspension can be displayed.
The body has very fine raised lines on the borders of the orange/green patches, this
is really neat since on the real car the green patches are applied with thin adhesive foil,
so you actually see a fine line shining through the white stripes.
The box art is a true piece of art, showing details that aren't even included
in the kit. Best of all, it is accurate enough to use as a guide for further
detailling and can also be used to determine what parts are reinforced with carbon/Kevlar
fibre material and what parts are reinforced with full carbon fibres.
The kit comes with two sheets of decals, one containing all white and green parts
of the color scheme and a smaller sheet containing all smaller details.
For touching up any green parts of the scheme, Tamiya X-28 Park Green is a close match.
This model was rereleased in 1999 by Tamiya's factory in the Philippines.
One nice touch with the rereleased version is that sheets of protective paper are carefully stapled
to both decal sheets, so the decals won't stick to instruction sheet, box or parts bags (Tamiya subsequently started putting the decal sheets in protective bags in all their kits).
Both Modeler and Studio 27 jumped the bandwagon by releasing etched stainless steel
detail/upgrade sets and Studio 27 also released no less than 4 different sets
of decals allowing serious modelers to recreate all of the 787 and 787B liveries ever driven.
This model was rereleased in 2004 by Tamiya's japanese factory, this time the two decal sheets were replaced by
a single high quality sheet printed by Cartograf, this is indicated on the box top and on the short edge.
The price of this rerelease went up to 2400 Yen but the quality of the decal sheet makes up for that.
At the same time as this rerelease, Studio27 did a fresh run of three of their 787B decal sets
and of their etched stainless steel detail/upgrade set and Acu-Stion released a new etched
stainless steel mechanical parts upgrade set.
