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One of my all-time favorite movies is “Le Mans” with and by Steve McQueen. I think that 1970 was the ultimate racing year and the Le Mans 24 hrs were at their best. Porsche 917 versus Ferrari 512, it never was any better than this and it never will be.

Ferrari came to Le Mans with no less than 12 cars. Their goal was obvious : winning! Nothing less would be acceptable. Unfortunately for Enzo, only 3 Ferrari finished the race and the best result was a 4th place. Porsche won the race with Attwood and Herrmann in a Porsche 917K.
The car that was able to follow the factory Porsches was in fact Ferrari N° 5, with Jacky Ickx and Peter Schetty at the wheel. But after 11 hours Ickx missed a braking point and crashed the car, killing a marshall… Ickx was not to blame, but still this was something that kept going through his mind for a long time.

Building

It is this car that I want to build as a model. I have searched for years to find a 1/24 kit and finally I found it. This car only exists in the "Fischer models" range and it consists of resin parts and 1 photo-etch frame. Even the tires are resin. I am curious to see how the result will look.
As for reference pics, there is not a lot to be found either. 1 color pic in the book "Cavalleria : Ferrari 512 S&M" (€ 66,80 for 1 pic!) is about the best I've got. So if you happen to have some photo-material about the Ferrari nr 5, please let me know!

Before I start the kit looks like THIS :
After a thourough study of the book and some racepics I come to the conclusion that car nr 5 had cooling ribs above the front wheels, something no other 512S had in that race (also the nose of the car was different from all the other Ferrari's - the pilots were allowed to choose the front part and Ickx was the only one who chose this front). Since my model has no cooling ribs I started drilling, scraping and cutting. When I am about halfway it looks like this :
After finishing the job I ask myself this question : if you look at the result, wouldn't it be better to cut the fins out completely and replace them by metal fins? Something to think over…
Next a pic of the poorly cast exhaust ends which I replaced by messing tubes.
And then the steering wheel : it is missing in the kit. But I do have an old Bburago steering wheel and I also have the correct steering wheel from another (Protar) Ferrari 512 M kit. Putting the 2 next to each other I see that the wheel itself is quite allright, but the rim is far from the same. So I made a copy of the rim out of some metal plate, drilled a hole out, sanded it to the right size en glued it to the wheel (after cutting the wrong rim away of course). Finally I cut some metal wire in fine pieces, representing the bolts around the steering wheel rim, and I made a steering shaft that fits in the dashboard.
In fact, it's all quite simple I finally decided to cut the resin fins away and replace them by plasticard I must admit that this looks a lot better!
Next I put the body in the base color, and 24 hours later I spraypainted the first layer of "Rosso Corsa". Although it looks not too bad already, (the pic's colors are bad because of the flash and the fact it's taken inside) I'll add at least 1 or 2 more layers, plus 1 or 2 layers of gloss coat...
The 3 layers of red paint are painted. Now it's time to start polishing the body. Once that job is done you can see the difference. By the way, it's automotive paint (Motip acrylic automotive paint to be exact)...
Now I let it rest for at least a week, before I continue working at the body.
The lower flanks are done with bare metal foil.
The front and rear window are glued with gloss varnish and the “engine” has been installed :

Far from finished (interior is still missing and outside details and decals as well) but you can start to see how it will look like. The side windows were cut open and the sliding windows are scratchbuilt. The resin wheels and tires look pretty good in my opinion.

It was about time I started working at the interior, which I did finally. Before I mount everything together, I took some pics of it. It's a pity that almost everything disappears once the model is mounted...
 

In the meantime I mounted the interior and the decals, leaving some glue marks. After drying for 24 hours I will polish the car so the marks will disappear.
Then it will be time to mount the last details such as the windscreen wiper, the rear mirror, 2 aerodynamic flaps and the number lights, as they need to be mounted on top of the numbers.
That will probably be a weekend-job...

Conclusion

After 4 months of work, it's finally finished !

Although it's a pretty basic model, I wanted to get it right and as detailed as possible (there are very few pics of the actual car that only raced half a race at Le Mans before it crashed).

I hope you enjoy the pics.

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