- Expert collector Joel Magee just happened upon this once-in-a-lifetime die cast car somewhere, and he doesn’t remember where.
- Rarer than the famous Beach Bomb Hot Wheels, this white enamel Camaro is probably the only one in existence.
- To keep or to sell is the question, but Magee doesn’t have an answer just yet.
If old action figures and lunch boxes are your thing, perhaps you’re familiar with America’s Toy Scout, Joel Magee. Magee has been collecting old toys related to G.I. Joe and Star Wars for decades and is the Disney expert for the TV show Pawn Stars, but even he didn’t realize just how rare a Hot Wheels car that he bought recently was. Turns out, the Enamel White Prototype Custom Camaro Hot Wheels he acquired is one of the rarest Hot Wheels cars ever made.
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Magee announced this week that he has found the only Redline Enamel White Hong Kong Version known to exist. Magee said the little metal thing, which he called the Holy Grail of Hot Wheels collectibles, could be worth $100,000. He hasn’t decided what he will do with it yet, as the shock of what he found is still setting in. Magee said this Camaro is even more rare than the famous (among collectors) Rear-Loader Beach Bomb, of which there are at least two known copies in existence.
The Toy Scout
“It’s hard to imagine a little toy car is worth more than a real one,” Magee told Car and Driver. He added that he doesn’t even know where he purchased this particular model, since he goes to so many events and buys so many collections.
“It didn’t resonate with me,” he said. “It was actually another Hot Wheels person who asked for a better picture. He said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never seen or heard of one of those before, especially Camaro. If you can pick any Hot Wheels car, the Camaro is at the top of the list.’ “
To do some more research on this particular model, Magee called up Larry Wood, a.k.a. Mr. Hot Wheels, who designed and modeled early Hot Wheels in the early 1970s, about the prototype Camaro. Wood said that when Hot Wheels first became popular, Mattel had a hard time making enough supply to meet demand. So the company started producing them in Hong Kong. But the U.S. and Hong Kong versions were not the same, with the toys of this era produced in Hong Kong having a blue-painted windshield instead of a clear plastic one. The best guess that Magee and Wood could come up with is that this model somehow made it from Hong Kong back to the Mattel headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where it was run down the production line in some sort of test. Then, Magee thinks, this Enamel White Prototype Custom Camaro Hot Wheels car was put into a standard package and sold just like any other car.
That a Hong Kong–built car was sent through the line is not completely strange, Magee said, given the way things worked at Mattel back in the early ’70s.
“Sometimes they did weird things at the factory,” he said. “There have been cars that have been found that have little bubble-top roofs, and they’ve been found with coins inside. Come to find out, the Mattel employees used to goof around. The cars would be coming down the assembly line and they’d put a penny inside before it was riveted closed. They thought that would be cool for some kid to find. That’s one of the things that makes the hobby what it is today.”
Source: Motor - aranddriver.com
