Finally finished after 231.5 hours . I always wanted to do this build since I was a 13 year old kid. I was into auto racing big time, and about the only source I had for news and pictures were magazines. I had a subscription to Sports Car Graphic, Motor Trend and Car and Driver. Whenever there was anything in a magazine about racing , I would cut it out and put the pictures and story in 2 scrap books. One for Stock car racing and one for Sports car racing and Indy cars. I still have the scrap books today but they are falling apart from age. I just happened to be thumbing through the sports car scrap book and spotted the story about Roger Penske’s victory at the Nassau Tourist Trophy race in the Bahamas in 1964. His Grand Sport looked so awesome, I knew I had to finally build a replica of it. Turns out the race was a battle between him and Ken Miles of “Ford vs. Ferrari” fame. Mile’s 390 Cobra could pull away from Penske in the straights but Penske’s Grand sport would catch up in the turns. Miles Cobra finally blew up trying to stay ahead of the powerful and nimble Corvette. I learned alot about the car. It had a 377 cubic inch all aluminum engine with 4 weber side draft carbs and hemi heads . It basically was a 327 stroked a quarter of an inch to get to 377. it pumped out 485 horsepower. This is an amt kit because I did not know there was a much better kit, until I started the build and was informed of this, so I had to do a lot of scratch building. The wip link is at the bottom of this page.
If you want to see the wip check out the link below
For some reason the link doesn’t take you to the right place, but its over at Model Car Magazine’s wip section for road racers, if you’re interested.
Great build Mark on what I can only imagine is a very challenging kit (couple in the stash). I especially liked reading the history of the car-was a different era back then.
Unable to get either link to work-I really want to see how you handled the hood-if memory serves me correct the Accurate Minatures kits do not have that version of the hood.
Thanks for the link-even more impressive that you took an AMT Corvette and created the Grand Sport-I assumed that it was the Accurate Miniatures kit…WOW!
Very impressive. The history lesson was also nice. Im also a motor sports fan. You mentioned the various car and racing magazines. When I was a kid (I’m 51 now) I read autoweek. I remember it covered only motor sports. It was more like a newspaper and they later printed it like a regular magazine with glossy pages. I haven’t seen a copy in sometime. I wonder if it’s still in print?
This is really cool because I don’t know much about Penske the driver. He sure has been successful on all aspects of the sport.
Nice job. What a great (and dangerous) era of racing. I had a subscription to Hotrod magazine from age 12 on I think! Really nice - and now you’ve make me want to do Ken Miles’ Cobra as I have done the AM grand sport.
I too would like to do Ken Miles Cobra with the all aluminum 390 it had, and display it right next to this model. But finding a kit is very hard and expensive. I probably have less then 50 bucks invested in this model, but I have seen diecast collectibles of it that weren’t correct, selling in the thousands of dollars. They just built a few and I guess the price has appreciated wildly.
Well isn’t that just too dang gone ter-it-er-able fer words. Fit issues! Why back in my day, you young whipper snaper, we never had “fit Issues”. Heck we was lucky if there was all the parts in tha box , if there Was a box. Did that stop us -HECK NO- we just sanded, cut, pushed, prodded the dang parts together, an’ held 'em with our fingers 'til the glue dryed. Then we had a Real Model! It even got so we’d call it a fine scale model
(did ya think the magizine was the first to use that? -HA!) They learnt that from us original modlers - ya bet cha. Young kids ta-day no idea how to model like we had ta do…mumble mumble
If you found the Monogram kit, go for it. Its ten times better then this amt kit for sure and its actually a Grand Sport kit. So you just need to assemble it and paint it and I’m sure you can figure out the fit issues.
Thanks, Steve. It was a hair puller at times but turned out okay. had to re-engineer the hood to fit flush. put a flange on the front of the hood and a pointed rod that fit into a tube at the rear of the hood to create a variable friction latch . the further you push down on the hood at the back the tighter the pointed rod got in the tube. I got it tight enough to hold the hood down when the hood got flush at the rear you need a small screwdriver to get the hood open now after it is shut. this should work good on other models too.I really dislike hoods that dont fit flush.
