On a recent holiday excursion to the Peak District, I found a great little shop selling vintage toys and just outside was a basket of die-casts.
After ferreting through the Matchbox, Hot Wheels and Corgi junkers, all labelled £1 a go and all in serious need of restoration, I spotted a plastic model, about 3" long, which I recognised as a Shelby Turbine.
Digging deeper into the box and holding up foot traffic on the pavement as I sprawled on the floor, rooting about - I found another two, in similar beat up condition. A quick check underneath showed 'Made in Japan' but no other trademark. Nevertheless, all three went in my bag and came home with me.
The models were pretty scuffed and had the remnants of stickers on them and all three had the cockpit windshield pushed down inside. All three were also missing a front spoiler. They were all freewheeling, being too small for a standard sized friction motor and seemed to date from the late seventies.
My principle interest in these odd shaped cars, was that Hot Wheels had released just such a car in their lineup in 1969. The Shelby Turbine was a real life race car, owned by Carrol Shelby and designed to steal the 1968 Indianapolis 500.
Shelby had previously shown his expertise in car design with the Ford GT40 and had seen the potential in turbine powered race cars, with a rival entry almost running away with the win the previous year, until an engine fault had put paid to its finishing. As a result, Shelby procured the services of race car engineer Ken Wallis to build a turbine based car and Bruce McLaren and Dennis Hulme to drive it.
With a massive budget, Shelby set to with Wallis to install a General Electric T58 aircraft engine in a car, which Shelby was aggressively confident in its success.
However, after building the car and experiencing 200mph record breaking speeds and 'terrifying' acceleration, the Indy race directors and governing body at the USAC reviewed and changed the rules for the upcoming race, having seen the potential of turbine powered race cars over standard piston engines.
A turbine powered engine is reliant on the amount of air that can be fed into the engine and the intake for the Shelby car needed to be 24" or more wide, but concerned that aircraft engine powered cars would render other cars obsolete, the USAC dictated that the maximum intake diameter be just 16".
As a result, the maximum achievable speed for the Shelby Turbine would only be around 160 mph, way below the speeds reached by standard Indy cars and nowhere near the STP Turbine car that had almost nailed the win the previous year. The regulations eventually led to Shelby giving up on his attempts to create a turbine based car.
Hot Wheels also made a model of the 1968 Lotus Turbine car as well as a standard Indy race car.
So, given that the three plastic cars were in pretty poor shape and did not appear to be particularly valuable or rare, I decided to customise them a little and make them a little more road worthy again.
The green car was in the worst condition and the plastic had become brittle. When I slipped a knife in to separate the two body shells, the side cracked by the cockpit and split in half. It was difficult to reset the windscreen, as I couldn’t separate the two pieces, so it had to stay in place as is. I added a roll bar on each one and for this one, dropped in a bit of chrome engine greenly.
As all three were missing a front spoiler, I removed the remaining one from the other two and used one to complete one model. I hand painted the body with Revell acrylic paint, to cover the cracks and added orange accents like the classic Gulf Oil livery. Some hand made decals finished it off.
What had been the red car, got two new aerofoil wings on the front, courtesy of a Kinder Egg aircraft, a spray finish of lime green and a coat of lacquer. The windscreen sat a little higher and the chrome parts were touched up.
Finally, I left the cream coloured car as is, cleaned it up and removed both front spoilers for a more classic ‘Shelby’ look. Some white accents and laser printed decals completed the look.
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