FansProject CA-11 Causality: Down Force

The final two limb components from FansProjects' unofficial Stunticons were a long time coming. Not sure quite why that was, considering their initial announcement wasn't that far behind Car Crash and T-Bone. Both were entirely new designs - an absolute necessity for their Drag Strip analogue at the very least - and, unlike CA-09 and CA-10, not clever re-shells of essentially the same transformation scheme.

Of the group, Down Force was always going to be the most contentious because his official G1 counterpart disguised himself as a Tyrell P34 racing car, a unique and rather radical design. I seem to recall quite a few complaints when images of Down Force first turned up on the fan sites simply because he only had four wheels rather that Drag Strip's six.

G1 Stunticons/Menasor (My First Gestalt!)

The arrival of gestalt teams in the UK back in 1986 felt like something of a triumph. We'd missed out on the Constructicons/Devastator for no obvious reason and suddenly combining robots were 'the big thing' in both the TV series and the Marvel comics. This was back in the days when Hasbro's UK marketing and distribution made gaffes like releasing Metroplex without Trypticon, and then Scorponok without Fortress Maximus, so it was also rather surprising that all four of 1986's teams were released in good numbers.

One rather obvious point of interest was that this was the first time the Decepticons got a truly significant ground presence, and the first time the Autobots gained some air power, so much was made of this in the associated fiction of the time. With most humans thinking all giant robots were evil invaders from another world, and only a select few aware that Autobots tended to disguise themselves as cars and trucks, while Decepticons tended to go for jets and spacecraft, this turnaround threw everything into doubt...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... The Stunticons!