Click here for catalog! SHORT TRACK MODELS by Rod McLeod
Mike Stefanik's Pontiac Late Model – 1977 Season
Click here for catalog!
Mike Stefanik's Pontiac Late Model – 1977 Season
decals by BULLRING GRAPHIX!
Click here for catalog! | Mike Stefanik's Pontiac Late Model – 1977 Season |
decals by BULLRING GRAPHIX!
When Model King announced the reissue of the Pontiac GTO from the old MPC Super Stockers series, the search was on for anyone who might have raced one of these body styles. An old picture turned up of a car driven by Mike Stefanik that looked like it might be a good candidate.
I sent an e-mail to Mike’s website and his wife put me in touch with Rich Kearns who answered a lot of questions I had about this car. Mike raced it as a rookie in 1977 in a six-cylinder class and also in 1978 with a V-8.
Here’s what Rich had to say when I asked if this was the 1979 car that he won his first track championship in at Stafford:
“This is not the Championship car. This would be the first car that Mike built, best known to us for the amount of engines it blew up. The year was 1977. In 1978 the same car was purple and white with big fender bubbles molded into the hood (the tech men didn't like it) but Mike Joy dubbed it the Darth Vader Pontiac. Mike won one race at Monadnock and two at Stafford. That year we had a V8. The car was sold to Dan Avery at the end of the year, and we built the Camaro for 1979. The Camaro was the championship car. If you are going to make 1/24th scale it will have to weigh about 135lbs. this thing was a tank.”
Rich provided the missing details for the graphics and the artwork was completed and sent off to Les for the Bullring Graphix print treatment.
I set about doing some minor modifications to the Super Stocker kit to make it look more like the real car.
The major change was to replace the V-8 with the six-cylinder engine out of the Trumpeter Nova kit. I already had plans on turning the Nova body into a stock car so this wasn’t a big loss. The AMT 1960 Chevy pickup also has a suitable six in it. I added a carb from the parts box, an air cleaner from an AMT Winston Cup kit and replaced the automatic tranny with something more suitable. The headers were made from two sets of the left side headers out of an AMT 1969 Chevelle. Some careful candle work got the headers shaped to fit the six-cylinder and exit out of the left fender. I added some Evergreen tubing to get the pipes out the fender.
The hole in the fender and the wider front wheel openings were the only changes I made to the kit body. I didn’t open the wheel wells out far enough though when compared to the pic of the real car, it had huge front fender openings.
The real car didn’t have a full windshield; it ran a half-piece of lexan or plexi-glass in an angle-iron frame only on the driver’s side. I made up a frame out of Evergreen plastic angle-iron and cut the window out of overhead transparency acetate plastic. Four dabs of Micro Kristal Kleer attached the glass to the frame. A window net was made from some mesh material and medical tape.
The door bars were altered from a set out of the Model King Pinto modified kit. These could easily be made from Evergreen plastic but I had the extra Pinto pieces in the parts box.
The body was painted using two shades of Duplicolor spray that seemed to match the pictures. The chassis was painted gloss black with the interior painted a light gray to match the pic of the real car.
The last step was to lower the car as it sat far too high when everything was together. At this point I was beyond wanting to re-engineer the suspension so I just filed out the holes in the wheel backings, trimmed the inserts down and this let me lower the car significantly. Not an accurate way to achieve the result but for a shelf model it gets the car sitting much more realistically.
Other than the modifieds listed, it was built straight from the box and ended up looking pretty much like the real car. Since the completion I’ve obtained another picture of the car that shows the air cleaner poking through the hood. It also was raced with the 1968-69 style front end rather than the 1970 provided in the kit. Rich says they switched because the newer style was a lot heavier.
Now I have to decide on whether or not to build that Darth Vader purple and white version."
The real car...
(Note from Mr NASCAR: Rod is a fellow Canuck, short track enthusiast, and one of the NASCARphiles in GROUP 25... He is the "Resident Artiste" for BULLRING GRAPHIX)