Beta Montecarlo White

The car behind the shade

The Lancia Beta Montecarlo was a two-seat coupe with the engine mounted transversely behind the crew, and it was built from the mid-1970s. Its real fame, however, came from the racing offshoot, the forced-induction version for Group 5, which collected championship titles at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s and became one of the icons of the silhouette special era. Its body with wide fenders and a tall rear wing was painted white in the great majority of its starts, and only then came the stripes and the advertising.

Why not to reach for a white from the standard range

White is not a single color. Whites differ in temperature, in opacity and in the way they behave under a clear coat: a cold white with a bluish cast looks alien on a period car, while too much gray takes away the gloss. The shade from this range is mixed for one particular car, so the tedious comparing of color chips and the fine-tuning with a drop of gray or ocher falls away. At the same time its opacity is set so that a thin coat can be maintained, which is essential with white, because a heavy coat rounds off the edges and swallows the engraving on the body.

Working with the color

It pays to spray a light base first, otherwise white asserts itself only slowly on dark plastic. Apply several thin coats with pauses between them and let the surface cure thoroughly before the decals. Thinning and drying time follow the instructions on the packaging. Once dry, it is worth polishing the surface with a very fine abrasive, because white brings out even the slightest graininess that a darker color would hide. Only on a smooth base do the gloss coat and then the decals belong.