ckBrenneke's Replica Garage

A few more new paints to show.

Frank Wrathall's 2012 Dynojet Avensis on the Scion tC 2012.




Started this last year, finally got round to finishing this. The base is metallic so that the silver stripes are reflective, and I could put on the Avensis's silver grill bar.

Tom Chilton's WTCC 2013 RML Group Chevrolet Cruze on a Volt.



Fairly simple paint, had most of the logos done, so giving this away for free on my Brenneke storefront.

Olly Clark's Time Attack UK 2013 Roger Clark Motorsport Subaru Impreza Gobstopper.




This is a heavily abridged version of the Gobstopper's livery that ran at Cadwell Park recently in the first round of the Time Attack Championship. There's no way I can accomodate all the logos this car requires - the sponsor board is over 500 layers alone - so did what I could with it.

I've been suffering a bit of Forza-apathy for a while, and even painting held no appeal to me recently.  It's one of the reasons I have quit TORA staff, amongst others, as I have been finding it hard to keep enthused about Forza and Xbox in general.  Anyway, as we motorsports fans all know, this years LeMans 24 started with a tragedy, and that was enough to shock me out the apathy, in a strange way.

In 2008, about 7 months after Forza 2 came out, I was on the FM.net site, intrigued by an original paint someone had created for a Forza 2 BTCC series.  I investigated the site, and found their BTCC series had been created as a companion to their primary series, the British GT, which the site was named for.  I joined the BTCC running a pair of Team Halfords Honda Civics in 2008 livery with my friend garyp3398.  Within a year we had migrated to a new forum, expanded greatly and I was on staff preparing a new season of the BTCC.

I didn't really follow GT racing - I still don't, really, I find it very hard to follow and not very exciting tbh.  But given the influence of the British GT on our site, it was hard to avoid it, and I started following the half-hour highlights on Channel 4.  While much of it passed me by, and I was more focussed on BTCC, there was one car that made an impression on me.

The Christians In Motorsport Ferrari F430 (which has gone on to become Rosso Verde) looked scrappy amongst the many other, cleaner, sharper and brighter, liveries on show in the BGT at the time.  It also struck me as an odd entry - clearly a marketing ploy by the church to raise awareness and show them as up-to-date with an entry into such a technological sport.  The amateur driver wasn't a favourite either (no offence to Hector Lester, he's doing something I can only dream of, but he's not the greatest talent), and the car was becoming rather staid and unfashionable, despite being solid.

It was the team's pro driver that stood out.  Allan Simonsen was utterly fantastic.  Whatever time Lester would drop in his stints, which wasn't always much, Simonsen could find it and then some.  He could drag the car through the field with ease, and I was always surprised he wasn't in contention for bigger seats with bigger teams, throughout the world.  But his partnership with Lester has lasted up until his untimely death, and it's him that sticks in my mind when I think of the British GT championship.

When I finished work on Saturday and got home, after saying hello to my little girl, I checked the net for an update on LeMans.  Twitter was mentioning what a good job under such difficult circumstances Radio LeMans were doing, but I saw no mention of a fatality, so I switched to Autosport and immediately rocked back in chair, gutted.  Allan Simonsen for me was GT racing, he was the iconic figure that came to mind when thinking about it, driving the 2008 CIM F430 to results that were beyond it.  Matt created a great version of it in FM2, which I used all the time.

I'm not a fan of tribute cars on Forza.  Personally, I've never been inspired to create a tribute to someone using the paint shop, although I totally respect other's desire to do so.  But this fatality hit home to me, and I felt inspired to create a livery that reminded me of him.  I've seen many Aston Martin replica tributes to Allan already, but that wasn't the iconic car for me.  It was the CIM F430, so that's what I have set about recreating in the limited time I've had over the last two days.




I made it for me - it's not perfect, and it's fairly simple, but the real one never looked perfect and was simple anyway, that was the point - but I've put it up for free on my ckBrenneke SF if anyone wants it.

RIP Allan Simonsen.

What an awesome tribute to him Scot.

That's an awesome tribute Scot. Definitely will be purchasing the livery from your storefront later.