A semi-whiffed Ferrari 512S

[PR19_Kit]

At Telford this year, SIG Italia, of which I'm a VERY loose member, are having a 'Protar' theme on their stand. Protar were at Italian model company started by the motorbike racer Tarquinio Provini after he'd retired from the saddle, and many of their earlier kits were of racing motorbikes in 1/9 scale, and superb kits they were too. I built a couple of them for my mate Derek's model shop window display, even though I know NOTHING about racing motor bikes.    One of them was a Gilera (I think) that had a V8 engine ACROSS the frame (!) and had a very smooth fairing all around it.

But I'm, getting off the subject here, and it happens that I've had a Protar Ferrari 512S kit in The Loft for a while, and I was intending to build it OOB to compare with an updated Heller Ferrari 512M kit and conversion that have, the former in Ferrari red and the later in the late Mark Donahue's blue and yellow.

Anyway I got the kit out of The Loft when Jeremy mentioned the Protar theme in the SIG's latest newsletter, and here it is.



It's a pretty old kit, all Protar kits are, but very well done and the parts count is impressive without being excessive.



It even comes with coil springs for the suspension! They're the little black bits in in the plastic bag just to left of the tyres. Looking through the instructions it seems I could build it one of three different versions depending on the race it was in and one was Le Mans in 1970, which happened to be the same race that was used as the centrepiece of Steve McQueen's film 'Le Mans', of which I'm a big fan!

So I'm going to try and build the kit as Ferrari No. 8, driven in the film by 'Erich Stahler' (actor Siegfried Rauch) but it'll need a few mods as the kit has a slatted rear 'window' and the cars in the film, and for real, had clear rear windows. There's a cracking shot in the film when the car, having been bounced off the Armco and smashed its front bodywork, has a new front body panel replaced in the pits, and that part is brand spanking new and the rest of the car is weathered to hell and gone!

It'd look great as a model, and I'll try for that, even though weathering isn't really my thing.

And as it's a model of a car that never really raced, the No. 8 car in the film was specially painted and decaled like that for the film, it's a Whiff too! Can't be bad, eh? 

[jcf]

The Protar 512 is the Heller kit which has also been released in Testors, Union, Wave and Fujimi boxes. I have the Union release which is moulded in white and dark gray.

The Heller 512 is the only game in town unless you want to go Model Factory Hiro or try to find a Fisher Model and Pattern 512 on eBay, very expensive because all of Paul's patterns, moulds, tools, reference material and drawings etc. were lost along with his home in the Paradise, California forest fire in 2018. He's a really nice guy, I visited him a couple of times back in the '80s when he lived in Southwest Washington State.

[PR19_Kit]

How bizarre, it seems I've now got two of the same kit, moulded by two different companies. But my Heller 512 is somewhere up in The Loft 120 miles away from me now, and I can't remember the last time I looked at it. 

That conversion kit I have for the 'Short Tail, 512M maybe one of Paul Fisher's, but it's been just as long since I saw that as since I saw the Heller kit. I'll be back there in a few days so I'll surely check them both.

[zenrat]

Maybe drop a great big american V8 into it.  A Cammer perhaps...   

[PR19_Kit]

Hehehe, you have a one rack mind Fred. 

But no, it's that screaming V12 that'll be in there, maybe with plug wires, just maybe...........

[PR19_Kit]

I spent much of y'day evening running the 'Le Mans' film through, yet again, on my laptop with the intention of taking lots of screenshots so I can get the details and placement of the decals and the paint scheme correct on the model. It's slightly weird trying to confirm 'details' of a model that will be an 'actual Whiff'.......

The film producers obviously decided that I couldn't do that as if I tried to take screenies they all turned out totally black! But I'm made of sterner stuff and got my mini-cam out and stopped the film at the points I needed and took pics of the screen!    As a result I've now got around 30 shots of the No. 8 Ferrari to ensure my model is 'right'.

This is the 'Master Shot' that suggested how it should look, with 'Franco Grozzi' pounding on the roof of the car to urge 'Stahler' on. Gino Casanni looks NOTHING like Grozzi did in the RW, but the roof pounding was very typical.



You can see the brand new front end of the car, and the heavily weathered rest of it, that after almost the entire 24 hrs racing.

I noticed that they used different cars for 'No. 8' at different times in the film as sometimes it appears with a roof bulge over the driver's head, and sometimes not. 

Mine will have the bulge, because it can............

[PR19_Kit]

Hmm, me and my mouth, or fingers in this case.

A scale 3-up of that Master Pic, and a tape-up of the kit parts shows only too clearly that the cars in the movie have a much longer tail than the kit, and it's quite a different shape too. Looks like a fair amount of styrene engineering will be required.



The Master Pic No. 8 looks a lot lower too, but I think that's the aspect ratio setting of the movie on my laptop. The wheelbase of the two pics above is the same however, oddly exactly 100 mm in 1/24.

[PR19_Kit]

Hmm, me and my mouth, or fingers in this case.

A scale 3-up of that Master Pic, and a tape-up of the kit parts shows only too clearly that the cars in the movie have a much longer tail than the kit, and it's quite a different shape too. Looks like a fair amount of styrene engineering will be required.



The Master Pic No. 8 looks a lot lower too, but I think that's the aspect ratio setting of the movie on my laptop. The wheelbase of the two pics above is the same however, oddly exactly 100 mm in 1/24.

[Thorvic]

I noticed that they used different cars for 'No. 8' at different times in the film as sometimes it appears with a roof bulge over the driver's head, and sometimes not. 

Mine will have the bulge, because it can............

Sure it wasnt all the roof thumping that flattened out the bulge over the course of the race   

[PR19_Kit]