1990 Pontiac Grand Prix #66 Trop Artic / Phillips

This car was built for a race called Northland 500 that runs in Germany every summer in the end of june on a really nice landscaped track. Here the car is ready on the track, waiting for the race.

The rules for this race says that you can only use a special chassi from japaneese manufactor Sakatsu. We have free chassi choice in our club and the Sakatsus doesn't perform so good on our track so we don't use them. And since we can't use our normal cars due to the wrong chassis on them for the Northland 500 rules we have to build special cars for that race.

The rules for Northland 500 also says that the body can be from 1988 or newer. Since we in our club according to our rules only can build cars from the last 10 years I choose a little older car from 1990 for this race to get something else than the usual stuff to build. It was bought from: Modelroundup. They are a very good source for all types of Nascar kits.

Here follows the report how this #66 Pontiac was built

Here are the only pictures I could find of the original car. The kit is a Revell/Monogram 1:24.

The interior

This is the interior. The driver is from Matthias Parkes own production but with a head from Modern Motorsports and also the arm is from them with the somewhat rude gesture. Wonder why he is so angry?

I started with the original dashboard but it didn't come out right. I tried to mold glass with white glue but the surface didn't become smooth (I'll try epoxy next time) so I mounted in a dashboard that is a photoetched piece instead. Looks much better!

The window net is a real one. The plastic net didn't look so good and you couldn't see the driver behind it so I mounted this one instead.

The decal on the fire extingisher makes it look really realistic. It wasn't included in the kit, I took it from one of Slixx Goodies sheets.

The driver straped in in his chair. The belt is made with tape. The belt buckle didn't look right so I changed it.

Here is the new buckle. It is a piece of metal I found in my scrap box. Not good for racing, adds weight, but the look is important to me so I choose this one anyway.

I spray painted as much as possible on the interior but all detail work is made with brushes and a steady hand. A good way to clean a brush is in an ultra sonic cleaner, they come out really clean!

The body

The windows are painted and so are the wheels.

The body is painted by Peter Bjurman who is a professional car painter and uses real car paint. The decaling and detail painting is made by me. This time the clear coat went really bad with lots of small holes in it where there simply wasn't any clear coat. Peter put down a really neat work in fixing that problem by spraying more clear coat on it and then fill in the holes. Then he grinded the thick clear down after it had dried with 2000 grit paper and finally applied a thin top coat. We still haven't figured out why this problem accoured but in the end, it came out extremly good! Thanks Peter!

This is how the Sakatsu chassi looks like that sits under these cars. The chassi on the picture still has the old motor, the so called V8 mounted. This year we had, according to the rules, to use another motor called F10 since the V8 isn't available any longer. The F10 has less torque but higher rpm so you have to gear it totally different meaning all the old knowledge about the best gearing for this track went bye bye...

When the car stood on the chassi it was time to get down to the local club track for the first test...

And what happens? The yellow car bumps into the brand new #66 car and makes a donut on it!
No wonder why the driver is so angry and puts the finger up in the air!

The donut is actually a slixx decal from a goodies sheet. I thought it could be a nice little joke for the race with the donut and the finger arm.

In the banked turn.

Coming in the banked turn side by side with the yellow car I drove in the Northland 500 race last year and came 5th with. The grill on the #66 is not finished. These pictures where taken at our club track here in Stockholm, Sweden wednesday evening just a few days before the race in Germany and to be honest there is more than the grill that isn't ready underneat. The whole chassi is not tuned and the interior and everything else is just loosely mounted. The car was barelly drivable, but the pictures came out nice :-)




It was time to pack and fly to Germany for the race and the final work on the car to get it race ready.

The race

We arrived on thursday and spent the whole day in the hotel trying to fix the last things on the cars.

Friday afternoon and the car is ready for training. The yellow Pennziol car is my backup car if the untested #66 doesn't perform good enough.


The track opened for training late friday afternoon and we started to see how our cars handled and also we tried to learn the track. It is rather tricky with the section on the picture which takes practice to go through with the perfect speed, it is easy to loose several 1/10 of seconds here with the wrong driving.

Friday night back at the hotel I made the final preparations and wanted to switch to the tires I had made for racing. When I took the inserts out of the practice wheels one insert broke in the middle and I had to cut the training wheel into pieces to get the inserts out as unharmed as possible and then glue it together again. I didn't bring any spare inserts or golden paint with me. Lesson for next year. Saving the insert and fixing it as good as possible took a little more than one hour.

This is how the repaired insert looks. At some distance the cracks and the missing paint aren't visable.

Saturday morning, ready for the race! At practice friday evening I had managed to drive the 29 meter long track at 6.86 seconds which is a really good lap time.

Picture by Matthias Parke
Next morning on a colder, little slower track, I qualified it at 7.083 which was the second best time and gave me the start in the A group with the five fastest drivers. Here the car is on the starting line. After just a couple of laps I deslotted and got another car that crashed into the side of mine since I ended up on his lane.

After that the speed wasn't the same, something had happened. I stopped and checked if I could see anything with the guide flag or braid but it seamed okey. I couldn't hold the speed of the rest and stopped again and found that a part of the interior in the rear had broken loose in the glue and it hanged down on the rear wheels and caused friction. I managed to solve that problem and got the speed back.

I was about 10 laps behind but drove like a madman and managed to drive really fast and had several laps below seven seconds, the best one at 6.935 which was better than the best qualify time. I deslotted a little to much in the stress but managed to slowly gain on the rest of the pack and regained contact. My guess is that I could have taken the second place (add 10 laps to my result below and you will see the potential) if the problem hadn't accoured but it was my own fault, I simply had glued this piece of the interior badly and with Murphys law involved nothing ever breaks at practice just during the races...

I finally made the forth place, one position up from last year. Not perfect but acceptable. And next year there is another Northland 500. I will be there. Will you too?

The top 5 Results of Northland 500 June 26 2004

We where three swedes in the top five as you can see and it was tight in the end results between place 2 and 5!

Jens Badenkopf won the first Northland 500 in 2001 and has been in the top finishes on the following ones. Matthias Parke has won in 2002, 2003 and now 2004 where he basically outclasses the rest of us with 14 laps more.

The rest of the Swedish Team placed themself like this: Niclas Lindblom took the 9th place this year with the car he used last year and came 16th with - that's improvment in driving! 12 year old Jimmy Månström took the 18th place, up from 22th last year and Lars Johansson who where here for the first time took the 24th place of 29 starting drivers.

Want to read more from this race? Check in the "Race Report" section on this site where there also are some video clips from the race!