How Hot Wheels are made

Hot Wheels’ 56-year history is awash with cool stories and even cooler race replicas. We meet some of its iconic designers, and one of the brand’s biggest fans; racer Patrick Long.

With eight billion examples sold since its 1968 launch, Hot Wheels is less a toy, more a phenomenon. A recent addition to its ‘premium’ line is a detailed recreation of the Alfa Romeo 155 V6 Ti DTM racecar of the 1990s. Perfect for those of us who can’t quite stretch our budget for the real thing…

Passion for race cars

Crucial in bringing it to life was designer Mark Jones. Known as The Godfather within his team (and on Hot Wheels fans’ forums), Mark retired from head company Mattel in 2023 after 36 years of service and over 300 car designs. This amazingly accurate Alfa is among his final flourishes.

“There was a Mattel toy years ago called the Vac-U-Form,” he tells me. “You’d plug it in and vacuum-form little car bodies. I got one aged 11 and started making bodies for my slot cars.”

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While he ventured into full-size car design once his childhood hobby evolved into a vocation, he soon gravitated back to toymaking – an industry that’s gone through vast change across his storied career. The dawn of digitised design and 3D printing has certainly sharpened the Hot Wheels production process.

With the Alfa Romeo 155, Mark’s job wasn’t to simply shrink the real-life DTM racer down to a 1:64 scale mould; Mattel’s designers mine the character of the car they’re making to truly replicate (and occasionally exaggerate) its key traits. “The gentleman at Alfa Romeo was a designer himself which meant he could be a little more critical of what we’d done,” Mark says of the validation process. “I was able to use his input to force my manufacturing people to do the things I really wanted in the first place.”

No time for decals

Racecars come with their own unique challenges, chiefly liveries. “Some companies own the rights to everything which allows us to use the whole design. But then it’s limited by our production budget and how many colours we can do. We’re running the production line so fast we can’t apply them as decals. We either do a tampography rubber stamp or a more detailed laser print.

“I like racecars. So I’ve had to try and control myself when we’re deciding what to make. When I was first doing ‘basic’ line cars I did a GT1 Porsche, Le Mans Mercedes even an Alfa Bat. But at that time racecars maybe weren’t big sellers.

“The computer games have really helped us; they’ve helped broaden our audience’s awareness of these cars. Those who were too young to see them run in races have now driven them in games. We’re two industries growing hand in hand.”

“Mainly Porsches”

It helps having friends in high places, too. Patrick Long has winners’ trophies from the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Daytona but grins just as widely discussing his other automotive passion: Hot Wheels.

“I mainly collect Porsches,” he says. “There are too many offerings to focus on more than one brand, otherwise my house would be full of them! I’ve never bought anything online, it’s just hunting on my travels.

Unboxed

“I keep them in the packet, but I’ll take them out if I have extras. I have a collector gene; as a kid I collected stickers and never stuck them anywhere. It’s almost a shame to not actually play with them! But it’s not about value. The packaging tells the story of the company.”

His role isn’t limited to collecting, however, having rolled up his sleeves and got involved in designing his own Hot Wheels thanks to a tie-up between Mattel and Luftgekühlt, Patrick’s events series in celebration of air-cooled Porsches.

“The design team liked what we were doing, so they asked if I wanted to go and meet them,” he says. “It’s such a young, forward-thinking team, one which does a great job of celebrating its history and its legends. I started out as a fan, so to have helped create a few Hot Wheels of my own? When you stop and think about it, that’s pretty cool!”