Protar Grand Prix models are about the coolest moto-ephemera there are for golden age GP history junkies. For starters, founder
Tarquinio Provini is himself a small displacement Grand Prix legend. He raced illegally for 2 years under his uncle's name, Cesare, until Provino was of legal age, then continued to race Grand Prix for over a decade, winning the Motogiro in 1954 and two successive World Championships in 1957 and 1958 for Mondial and MV Agusta respectively. Provino almost killed himself, breaking his back during the 1966 Isle Of Mann TT. That's when he started making models of all the rarest, coolest prototype racers ever.>
The gallery images are the complete pages of a 1973 Protar catalogue, owned by BMW sidecar monkey Alex Kravchuk, who's currently building IOM TT winner and Team Obsolete racer, Dave Roper, a seriously fine Moto Guzzi replica chassis out of the Works garage. Alex couldn't find schematics for the original works Guzzi, so he bought the next best thing, Protar's perfectly correct 1/9th scale model of the famed 1957 Moto-Guzzi V8 500cc racer, listed as "Art. 105" in the catalogue.
Provini sold the company a few years ago just before his death to scale model producer Italeri, but the Protar models from this catalogue have long been discontinued. Increasingly rare, older models are expensive. An unopened example of the Moto-Guzzi V8 recently for well over $300.
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