Corgi Toys 312; Marcos Mantis; Metallic Red

The real Marcos Mantis was never a beautiful car. They only made about seven of them.

I can remember three Marcos cars from this era, the Mini Marcos 850 was a pug of a thing, but the 1800/3000 sports was truly beautiful, The Mantis however was not - and the model is a Mazak, and has the heaviness that is typical of the cars with that stamp on the base. The Marcos Mantis was added to the Corgi range in August 1971 and remained in production until 1974, it is always metallic red and values are going up.

This Corgi Toy was sourced in March 2022 from a private collection, there are actually two cars in the photos below, the car with the box was photographed when the paper needed changing in the photo booth and the shutter was sticking on the camera, hence the white patches. The driver from a Marcos Volvo I had in stock at the same time has swapped into the Mantis and suffering from a scale mis-match.