Dynamic Ferrari 330P3

Here's the next instalment in my restorations of iconic '60s 1/24 slot cars. The Dynamic Ferrari 330P3 came out early in 1967 in kit form only. It was a big hit, with a high performance chassis mated to a very beautiful Lancer vac body. Here's how it looked on the toy store shelf in '67 (courtesy of the LASCM)



And here it is assembled (again LASCM).



Nowadays these models are rare and usually messed up in several ways. I'd been looking for one for many years and a few months ago I finally picked up a complete chassis. As usual, there was good news and bad news. On the plus side the major original components were all there and virtually unused. On the minus, the guide, rear wheels and all tyres were wrong and of course the body and box were missing.



I expected this to be the start of a very long story but the missing items started showing up amazingly quickly. This was due to very helpful SF members, Don Siegel (dgersh), Pete Shepherd (Scudbong) and Graham Windle (GRAH1). Don volunteered a scan of the original card box insert, plus a set of rear wheels and tyres very similar to the originals. Pete then came up with a complete car containing all the necessary missing original chassis components and a body, which was a wreck unfortunately.



Notice how Pete's body is kind of sucked in at the rear and sides? We'll return to this horror later! A few weeks later Pete offered me a virtually perfect NOS Lancer P3 body as well! This was frankly astonishing - these things almost never appear in the UK nowadays.



Meanwhile, Don and I had been working together to track down the original plastic box that this model and several others of the same vintage came in. After some heavy duty searching I found a supply of "Jewelry Boxes" on thE BAY that were identical to the Dynamic box. This, plus Don's insert scans, gave us near-perfect boxes for the P3. Of course, about a day later, Pete showed up with an original plastic box and insert! By now I was dazed and confused, so I relieved him of it for the trivial reason that his insert was real and Don's identical item was a copy.



Don't ask me about the Mirage box - I have even less of an excuse for its existence . . .

OK, are you keeping up with all this?! By now I had all the components needed for a complete boxed Dynamic P3 model kit, plus enough spares to make a passable copy so I was ready to start the restoration. I wanted to end up with an excellent assembled painted model, one that might have been put together in 1967 by an expert modeller. That meant first taking the best original bits from the two donor chassis, cleaning and assembling into a 100% complete original Dynamic P3 chassis. Easy stuff.



The difficult part of course was the body. Unused Lancer P3 bodies are rare and precious and I couldn't afford mistakes. I checked through both this Forum and its US partner SlotBlog and discovered much lore on how to paint a 60s butyrate plastic vac body. My first source (from dc65x on SlotBlog) used enamel paint, which led me to a two month wait for an old can of Humbrol Italian Red (220) enamel to arrive from Cyprus - it never did. Meanwhile I'd been reading around and somehow convinced myself that modern acrylics such as Tamiya would work. This turned out to be a very big mistake that almost wiped out that beautiful Lancer body - please read on . . . .

OK, following dc65x's instructions I did some preliminary detail paintwork on the body, such as the rear grille (a wash with diluted black enamel) and the rear lights, which were actually a decal made from a photo of the real car.



I then masked the body, using Tamiya flexible tape . . . .



and sprayed the inside with three light coats of Tamiya TS8 Italian Red, then a top coat of Tamiya fine grey primer.



So far so good, right?

I now started work on the headlights. The fairings were tough to make - very little room to work in. I used thin plasticard sheet for this (below left). Fitting the headlights into these was very difficult and I ended up using plastic tubes to mount the headlights, much the same as the real car, with cotton buds to locate them properly while the glue set.



It was then that I made the nightmare discovery that my beautiful body was curling under the influence of that acrylic spray painting a few days earlier. All four sides were beginning to deform. This was a dark time for me and I didn't take many pics - below is the best.



The original body is at the top and the same body sprayed is below it. The yellow lines mark the bottoms of the bodies showing that the entire front of the painted model is dipping down. You can also see some curling of the bottom of the central section.

So what to do, trash my precious Lancer body and wait a decade or so for another to show up? No, I decided to fight. The damage was confined to areas of simple shape, more or less flat surfaces. For example, you can see above that the whole cockpit area ,with its side air inlets, are unaffected, presumably because its complex moulded shape resists deformation. So could I reverse the curling by bracing the inside of the body? I could tell just by hand pressure that this might work so I started building internal stressed framing.



At the rear the bottom was sucking up and the sides were buckling in. The framing shown above left reversed this. The straight sections are bamboo skewers and the curves are soft plastic rod (from the Q Tips again). The body's central section only had undercurling at the sides (see above) and this was largely reversed by four plasticard buttresses inside the wheel arches (two are visible above right). At the front, two bamboo push rods pushed the nose back up (above right and below, bottom image).



Whew, The Great Escape!! I wouldn't advise anybody to screw up their NOS Lancer body by using the wrong paint and then fix it but, ironically, the end result is arguably better than the original, because the modified body is very rigid and resistant to both further deformation and impact damage.

OK, a few more things then we're done and dusted. First, the cockpit interior. Absurdly, neither Lancer nor Dynamic provided one originally but my P3 was going to be beautiful so I had to have a good one. A few vac-formed interiors had arrived at Casa da Coides during my recent 1/24 feeding frenzy and one looked just right, with a right-hand driving position and a good head. I just had to build a rear bulkhead resembling the real car, again with thin plasticard (see below).



This bulkhead disappears backwards under the streamlined roll bar so it didn't need to mate accurately with the rear platform of the vac body. I kept the space under that roll bar transparent at its rear by masking it during the spraying, giving the illusion of empty space.



I then built a plasticard deck under it and painted it red so you can't see model innards (see later pics). I also gave the driver a proper steering wheel from a long dead Monogram 275P I got in 1965. The car and driver I modelled was Richie Ginther, who partnered Pedro Rodriguez at Le Mans in 1966 in the NART P3 entry. I finished the model with exhaust pipes, rear-view mirror, oil inlet cap, touch-up of inlets and outlets with matt black and a good decal job. Here's the result, with shots of the real car for comparison.





















And finally, my entire clutch of Dynamic 330P3-related stuff - I definitely need to sort my life out.



Andy