Corgi dug out the old Karrier cast and tweaked it to produce some more income from fans of Chipperfields Circus models. This came with smooth fixed wheels on the early models but soon afterwards the shaped fixed variety were put on and these are by far the more common.
The other item to appear early in 1962 was the Heinkel Trojan 'Economy Car', better known to most of us as a Bubble Car!
This came in all sorts of colours from, as far as I can tell, the very start, including orange, deep red, bright red, pale pink, deeper lilac-pink, metallic blue and a scarcer metallic peacock blue. Early issues had very small fixed smooth wheels and these remained the norm until much later in the day when small cast wheels were used. Apart, possibly, from some trailers this is the only model featuring these very small wheels in either form.
Neither of the January 1962 models had any special features other than suspension. The Karrier still lacked an interior! The Heinkel had either a lemon or red plastic interior and I am not aware of any variations. The pink had the red interior and the others had lemon.
There appear to be two shades of red for the Karrier - a brick red and a deeper red. The deeper shade is more like the usual Chipperfields colour and the brick red is a little less common but not particularly scarce.
It is quite extraordinary to see what is essentially the very ancient Mobile Shop model with the painted metal display inside still going in 1962 with only suspension added. This would be on the shelves as this month's 'new' model with items like the Bentley Continental and other far better featured models now older issues. I suspect that, if there hadn't been people wanting to collect all the Circus models, this would not have sold at all well. I don't believe it made it through to get free-spinning shaped wheels, being withdrawn in 1964.
You really would not want to change the tyre on the single wheel of the Heinkel so do watch out when buying this model!
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