I wouldn‘t consider myself a car person, but since watching Drive to Survive on Netflix I have been obsessed with Formula 1 racing. We get up in the morning every Saturday for qualifying and every Sunday for the race and even going so far as to watch 24 Hours of Le Mans. I admit that the Netflix docuseries is way more dramatized than the sport itself, but in general the races can be either wildly out of left wing or pretty predictable.

So far I‘d say my favourite team is somewhere between Red Bull Racing and Maclaren but once I had heard that Honda (the engine supplier for Red Bull) had posted various papercraft projects to the internet, I knew I had to build a Formula 1 car. The whole process took a few solid evenings after work to complete, but I had a ton of fun and want to share the experience and tips.

Before you embark on your papercraft journey, you‘ll need a few things first:

First thing we‘ll now need is the pattern and intructions! You can download the papercraft by going to Honda‘s Fan Zone website and scroll down near the bottom of the page where you should see a bunch of papercraft models. Pick one to download and print the pages off on your heavyweight cardstock paper.

Building the papercraft is as simple as following the included instructions.
But to help you out, here are a few tips:

• Cut slowly, use a ruler - Cut out the pieces slowly with your knife. It can be tempting to blast through the cutting part but the cut is really where the quality of your model starts. If you leave too much white space, it really shows through in the model. But also, it‘s paper so if you mess up just print another!
• Keep your knife sharp - If you ever find your knife catching on the paper while cutting, that means your blade is getting dull and it needs to be sharpened.
• When cutting curves, cut in a "C" direction (in to out) - This is a weird tip but I‘ve found that when doing cuts on a curve it is easier to control the cut going inwards then out like the shape of a "C".

• Use paint markers to paint paper edges - I alluded to this earlier but after you‘ve cut a piece I highly recommend painting the edge of the piece with a paint marker. The paper you‘re using is thick and will have a micrometer of depth which will end up showing through in your model.
• Use tweezers to help fold delicate folds - There are quite a few tiny folds in the build where you can use angled tweezers and a hard edge to fold the paper. I don‘t recommend folding these with fingers as you can get folds that are more rounded this way.
• Score the fold line to make crispier folds - And my best tip yet, if you "score" (make a sort of indent in the paper) the fold line before you fold, it will be easier to make a clean fold than trying to fold the paper on the fly. Again, the paper you‘re using is thicker than regular paper so aiding the fold however you can is worth it.

My build took 4 evenings (approx. 4 hours per night) to finish. I had a lot of white lines from the paper edges so I ended up painting over them with a paint marker and a fude pen. Overall I liked the sort of "comicbook" style the linework created!

Hope this was helpful and makes you want to build one for yourself! It is a lot of hard work and also very worth it!