Here are some of my son’s favourite toys, the Cars. I am forever tripping up on them, camouflaged against the roadmap rug in the living room, or lined up in very specific race positions on the many racetracks we draw together. The two movies, along with the Mater’s Tall Tales specials, are never far from the dvd schedule, and we all find ourself humming one of the tunes from the movies or saying ‘ker-chow’ or ‘dad-gum’ or such as like. My son has loads of these die-cast metal toys from both movies, some of them quite hard to find individually, to the point where it becomes a parent’s favourite quest to find the more obscure ones (I don’t know who Rip Clutchgoneski is in the movie but he for one is very difficult to obtain). And unlike so many toys, these get really played with, and my already multi-lingual son likes to get the Spanish one to count in Spanish, the French one in French, Francesco Bernoulli says ‘uno! due!’ tre!’ and so on. The German one is called ‘Vettel’ (actually it’s Max Schnell, but Sebastian Vettel is his favourite race-car driver, and I think he does the character’s voice in the German version of the movie, just as Lewis Hamilton guests in the original). See? I’m an expert.

Cars is a funny universe though. I read it as a Planet of the Apes type world, and would love to see Cars 3 run along those lines, whereby a human from the past arrives, does the ‘get your wheels off me you damn dirty Audi’ or something, and ends up with Mater pulling the Statue of Liberty out of Carburettor Canyon. Surely no crazier than the story of Cars 2?

I drew this in copic multiliner pen with watercolour, in the Stillman & Birn ‘Alpha’ sketchbook. I am using that sketchbook to draw a series of my son’s things. It’s great paper too.