I am really amazed at the amount of detail in such a small set.. One reason I really like small sets. They really use neat tricks to mimic detail in the larger sets with only a couple parts.

Before the Lego MANIA Magazine in the USA, there was "Brick Kicks", the official newsletter of the Lego Club. When I became a fan of Lego in 1994, it was to this I was first subscribed. Back then, joining brought with it nice perks aside from the magazine. One of those was getting a free set. This Octan F1 Race Car was the free set when I joined, and I loved it. It was the start of my RACE sub-theme collection, which would soon include the famous Hot Rod Club and a 3-in-1 Pack that included dragsters, a rally truck, and another one of these F1 Race Cars. I definitely recall having the twins race each other and against the dragsters and the rally truck. Many was the time I disassembled parts of the sets to make slightly different racing designs, but I always brought them back to the original designs.

The Octan F1 racer remained a staple of my race car lineup well into the early part of the 21st century thanks to missing out on 1993's Victory Cup Racers (a set I desired for many, many years before acquiring it from eBay in 2010) and the new slick-tire racers that were released in 1996 and became the norm until RACE was entirely shelved before being reborn as Drome RACERS in 2002. As such, I had to stick with this simple set. I cherish it all the same, a seminal part of my collection from my first year of fandom, and definitely in the peak years for the Golden Age of the Lego System.