NEW BUILDS: “For the final touch to our brew tonight, a pristine virgin in a gown of white”

That quote from the hilarious 1987 film Dragnet occurred to me as the way to set off my first “New Build” entry in a while, as I start showcasing the latest haul from the trip I made to Performance Slots & Hobbies shortly before leaving for X-mas vacation, the only one of that batch I picked up as a body only. It is being profiled as such because it is the only car from that haul destined for one of the AW Ultra G racing fleets, appropriately the numbered sports car fleet! It’s pristine, and its virginal, and its definitely white, and did I ever get lucky finally finding this awesome Model Motoring body in this color which I’ve been after for well over 3 years! The only vendor I ever know of that had them were sold out before I found them back in those heady early days of 2020, and while I have added several copies of this cool big block C2 hardtop roadster to my fleet in various colors, the white one with the black stripe on the hood has eluded me all this time, until now!

Oddly enough I don’t love this color on the real car, yet I think the model looks fantastic with the big black stripe down the front of the hood. And sure enough the fine folks @ PSH had not just one, but several copies, and they sold me this one that was still sealed in a cellophane bag and never mounted!

Now, to build this car, I had an idea; I’ve had this Ultra G chassis lying around for a while that’s a real dog; it hardly has any mileage on it but its just pokey, for no real apparent reason; sometimes you get a bad one. I needed to find something to do with this chassis. Well, this MM ‘Vette body is so small and so light that it actually does better on a slower chassis, because putting on in a really fast chassis would make it so insanely fast it would be uncontrollable (see the entry on my yellow XKE to find out what I mean!). But fear not; I punched it out with a new set of OS3 “Black Dragon” field magnets, and with a little “fiddling about” with the electrodes and brushes and also with the neodymium trac mag, I got it running about as good as any sane racer could want with such a small body on top! I also had several sets of the narrow Road Race Replicas 871 wheels that I have never used, and although I have plans for some of them, I have more than I can use, so I thought it was time to use a set on this small body. Mind you, this car will take the “C” and “D” sizes of wheel with RRR’s low profile tires-the two others in the fleet have those-but I wanted something that looked “period correct” for this car, and I think these wheels do! Take a look at how it came out and tell me if I’m right! The narrower wheels and tires mean less friction on the track, and though that may not be ideal in the turns, it can only help on the screamin’ straights! And the tires are the RRR silicones, so its not like they aren’t plenty sticky! An uber-long OS3 guide pin completed the package, all held together by a pair of Walther’s inimitable self-tapping phillips-head screws.

Assigned racing #51 from my Ultra-Cal pack-one of the few remaining unused numbers, and of course that had to be a white on black roundel to look just right-this “thin-wheeled superfast” has been christened with the spooky moniker “WENDIGO” after the wintry monster of native lore, and is driven by North Dakota-born Kaden “Crypto” Keyes, a 6-foot solid polar-bear of a racer with feet, hands, and arms big and strong enough to slam a 4-speed big block ‘Vette around this challenging road course with determination. While “Crypto” is still a rookie, we all have to start somewhere, and this is a hell of a rig for a rookie; the crowd expects awesome things from this car when the next Sports Car Tournament comes around!