Back in January of 2021 I did a post on a rough original Tuff Ones Ford GT-40 I had acquired for the body only at a low price and entered into my racing fleet. This “snow white” model with the orange stripe is, as it turns out, a very common car, one of the easiest of the older T-Jets to find, but also one of the better looking versions of the GT-40 made through the years. Its interesting to note-now, at least-that when I bought it, it came mounted not on its Tuff Ones chassis but an earlier open-rivet T-jet 500 chassis which (I would learn nearly a year later) is just about the fastest, best-running original T-Jet I’ve ever acquired! But, at the time, I had no interest in these, so it just got tossed into my “sell box” and the body was mounted on new Auto World Ultra G Thunderjet.
The car went through a couple of iterations before I finally decided to buy a set of colored wheels made in the original “Tuff Ones” style because I thought it would be cool to use the orange set on to mount up on this car to match the racing stripe. The end result looked great, and I was so happy with it that I topped it off with a set of those awesome, briefly made Firestone Goldline tires (which, as far as I can tell, are now out of production and no longer available). I chose racing #76 for this car, and due to the GT-40’s American origins, nicknamed her “Spirit of 76.” She’s been tearing up the track with the numbered racing fleet ever since, and was runner up for a tournament trophy once.
But time moves on, and my racing fleet keeps keeping better and better in increments, which is what these “Replacements” entries are all about: although I went out of my way to make this rough old body look good and had a cool back story for it, the latest “Cars N’ Coffee” releases from Auto World contained a new gold GT-40 that I couldn’t resist. This is the first time AW has made this body since (I believe) Release 6, which had to be 20 years ago. Due to its scarcity this is the first AW copy of this body I’ve ever acquired-up until now all my GT-40’s have been Aurora originals. I’ll never understand why it took them so long to repress this body but they finally have, and when I saw it in gold with red stripes mirroring one of the 3 LeMan’s ’66 cars, it was a done deal.
When it arrived and I saw that it had stock wheels color keyed to the body I elected not to change a thing, save for one detail: I used that last set of Firestone Goldline tires I had available to replace the plain black slicks it came with. It needed nothing else, and when I put it on the track for its first test, I could tell that it was going to be exceptionally fast!
What all this meant was that it was time for skilled driver Jim “Velocity” VanBuren to finally spruce up his 1966 Mk. II “barn find” racer, sending it through the expensive tunnel of a full restoration, where it came out the other side wearing racing colors that match its LeMans winning brethren from the same year. Though VanBuren named his car “Crusader” it has more often been called “The Spirit of 76” by race fans due to his racing number, and he’s just fine with that name, too. Fresh out of its long restoration, “Velocity” VanBuren has now broken-in the car in trials and is ready for the fall/winter race season at Drag City, and “Crusader” will be competing in the next full “64-pack” sports car race when the track launches its “Secret Oktober” racing series to celebrate the arrival of the neatest month of the year!
As an additional point of interest: because of the newness of this car, it is equipped “from the factory” with this new-fangled metal pin AW started releasing a while ago. During testing it seemed to work great. I first saw this on the VW Bug I bought early this year, but that is a seldom-driven cruiser in the Road Crew, so it will be interesting to see how these new-style pins perform in competition. I’m sure they’ll be strong; hopefully my fears about it leading to an increase in cracked screw posts won’t be realized!
So, as with our last installment of “The Replacements”, this leads us to the fate of the original car which is being bumped from the fleet. Distressed though it is, I still like the “honesty” of it’s Patina, so like the Cheetah that last left us, it is headed for a place in the Road Crew, where of course I have a special plan for it which I will outline in a future post!
