Just about every car freak has a bunch of unbuilt or partially-built scale model kits knocking around in the garage, and so I decided to throw a model-building party with a kit-bash-friendly communal stash of 1:24- and 1:25-scale car models. I worked on my Toyota Estima Police Interceptor kit and left it stock, while fellow Denver car writer Andrew Ganz opted to build a customized version of the 2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition.
With a dozen or so guests and several dozen kits and boxes of random kit parts on hand, some innovative creations were assembled that day. Someone brought a couple of Pontiac Fiero kits, each of which offered a builder the choice between the base Iron Duke 2.5-liter four-cylinder and the 2.8-liter V6.
Music for this shindig was vinyl-only, of course, and the soundtrack from Chevrolet’s 1974 promotional efforts proved inspirational for Mr. Ganz (who is the keeper of The Monroney Project, an online museum of junkyard-found Monroney window stickers) as he admired the Fiero’s Iron Duke and pondered a proper recipient.
Of course! The Fiero is a mid-engined Detroit two-seater, as is the Ford GT… and we just happened to have the Polar Lights snap-together Ford GT kit on hand.
When you have to build a model kit in a garage in one afternoon, you can’t build anything very elaborate, nor can you worry about that last 1% (or even 50%) of build quality. That’s fully in keeping with the philosophy that led GM to repurpose the tooling for the Pontiac 301 V8 when creating a big-displacement four-banger in a hurry. It appears that Mr. Ganz felt inspired by the stripes on the early-second-gen Pontiac Trans Am to make his own inverse version using hurriedly applied masking.
Rather than mount the Duke transversely (as in the Fiero), Mr. Ganz chose to give it longitudinal mounting, much like the arrangement in the Duked Chevy Camaro but in the rear of the car. It looks mean under glass, and the Duke’s high-double-digit horsepower would have moved the 3485-pound GT well enough to reach highway speed, eventually.
There was much admiration from the other model-builders at the party when this kit was finished hours before the glue-together kits the rest of us foolishly chose.
The crooked license plate was an appropriately Duke-ish touch.
It took me another couple of model-building parties to finish the Estima Police Interceptor kit (which now lives on a bookshelf in my office), and now I wish I’d swapped a Funny Car Hemi into it.
