Meet the Fleet – Sportscars: Ford GT-40 (Gulf Oil Livery)

• BODY: Aurora Model Motoring
• WHEELS & TIRES: Road Race Replicas

Judging by some of the recent cool releases on the diecast market, it appears that cars wearing the famous Gulf Oil livery of the early 1970’s are making a comeback; I’ve seen many issues from Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Johnny Lightning of various different types of cars in light blue and orange. Many will remember the famous Gulf sponsored Porsches of the early ‘70’s, prominently featured in the awesome 1970 Steve McQueen movie “LeMans.” These cars were cleaning up at tracks all over Europe as Porsche began what would amount to a 2 decade dominance of motorsport.

For myself, seeing a car flying the “Gulf colors” is a little more personal than it is for most people: my grandfather, God rest his soul, worked for Gulf Oil as a chemical engineer for most of his career. In that role he traveled the world, living at different times in London, Seoul South Korea, and Kuwait. The job never made him rich but he raised a family that included my dearly departed father in a comfortable middle class house and retired with a generous pension that kept my grandmother able to live safely, with the medical care she needed, until her time was up…all things that are in the past now that globalism and corporatism have erased the social contract. So, when I won this light blue Aurora “Flamethrower” on ebay a while ago, complete with a broad orange stripe and racing #5 pre-printed on the body, I knew I wanted to go “Gulf” with it from the start.

Unfortunately I wound up having more trouble than you’d think making this vision a reality; I was never happy with the look of this car, and I tried many, many different combinations of wheels, tires, chassis, decals, and other decorations to get it where I wanted it, but I never seemed to get there. One thing I didn’t like was the way the pre-printed number 5 circles on the sides of the car appeared to run off the body at the bottom, but what was really bothering me was the plain expanse of unbroken color on the sides was making the car look too “tall” and not really like a GT 40 at all. Then it dawned on me what needed to be done to improve its looks: I got a set of racing stripe decals in an orange that was an almost perfect match for the orange stripes, and cut them to fit along the bottom edges of the body below the door sills. It completely changed the look of the car! Unfortunately it also covered the lower half of the racing number but, not wanting to reassign the pre-printed number, I found some white roundels with the same #5 that were the perfect size to fit over the pre-printed roundels which restored the number to the car, allowing me to leave the pre-printed #5 on the hood and boot in-tact.

Fitted with a set of gray-finish Road Race Replicas wheels and low-profile tires, she finally looked right; that was when I added the Gulf Oil logos and hit the track.

Now that’s what a GT-40 should look like! Here’s to you, Gramps! I miss you.