LeMans Porsche 911GT1 '98 BBR 1:43

[jaykay640]

Hi everybody

I have been absent from the forum for a good while. That was for a very simple reason. My company in all their wisdom decided to block photobucket and the likes. Because of that I couldn’t access any forum threads that had pictures linked from such sources. So finally I arrived in 21st century and got internet at home and have full access again :-)

I’m in the process of catching up with all the builds that have been going on in the mean time. There’s some great new stuff around!
I have also done some modelling (…but not really on my McLaren ) that I now wanna show you.
It’s a BBR 1:43 scale kit of the 1998 Le Mans Porsche 911 GT1.
In the beginning it was supposed to be a little side project to my long time F1 project and I thought it would be nice to actually finish something in a reasonable time frame…but boy was I wrong :-)
I originally bought the kit when I saw it in a LHS and couldn’t resist even though I also have a 1:24 version sitting in my stash . I thought a BBR kit should be a good teaser for the big one that I wanna fully detail….one day :-) Well it turned out the kit needed more help than I anticipated! Let’s start….

First here’s a picture of the real thing in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart that I took a while back. I’ll add a couple more throughout the build report.





This is not the 1998 Le Mans winning car but the sister car that came in second just one lap adrift. 1998 was the last year the Porsche factory ran the 24h and won overall. It would be time to come back…..!
This car differs from the winning car with fluo yellow markings instead of fluo red ones ( plus driver names and numbers of course :-)

Next up a picture of the kit contents. Nothing spectacular but a good starting point. Obviously there was room for improvements ( more than I thought in the beginning ). My goal was to get a result that was at least better detailed than a good die-cast model.





I started by cleaning up the body. I quite like the grey resin BBR used. It’s harder than the yellow stuff you get from many other manufacturers, which makes it quite good to model small details with clean edges and thin walls. Also the grey colour is much better for reading the surfaces than the yellow resin.
The first major problem were the headlights. They were too small, wrong positioned and the shape was only a rough interpretation of the real ones.





Funny enough…or not…the 1:24 kit by Modeler’s/Scale Production has the same problem….just worse:-)
I enlarged the lights and moved them out and up and improved the shape ( on the real car the headlight glasses are taken from the production 996 ). The small extra lights also moved to the outside.
Here you can see the new shape compared to the kit shape:





…and from another perspective:





…and the real one for comparison:





I may not have hit it 100% but I think it’s an improvement. It was a lot of work for sure.

The next area that needed some attention were the body sides behind the front wheel arches. They were too edgy. On the real car these areas are smoother for aerodynamic purposes.
Here’s a closer picture of the original kit shape:





…and again the real car for comparison:





The NACA-ducts in the sides were also more like wedges and the air outlet ducts in front of the front wheels needed attention. ( You’ll see that later :-)





First another area that I wasn’t happy about…the rear end. That’s about the only area to show a few tech details and I wanted to improve that.
That’s the box stock look ( sorry…blurry picture….):







The real one for comparison:







The diffusor in particular needed changing. That’s the first part that had to go! The remaining body panels were cleaned and thinned ( time consuming and tricky to get in the corners…but that was necessary :-)





The white edges are added with styrene sheet.

On top of the body I deepened and thinned the top surfaces of the brake ducts.







They will later be half blanked, for in LeMans the cars need less brake cooling than on short twisty circuits. See again a real one:





That’s it for the moment. More progress will follow soon :-)

Cheers

Jaykay

[klutz_100]

I am really glad you have internet now!

Super work and extremely interesting to read

I am REALLY looking forward to the next episode

[Spike2933]

nice to see another 1/43 car being built, can't wait to see what the BBR kits are made of

[gionc]

I though your improovments were great, than I remind the stuff is 1/43... amazing jobs...

[gulfclk]

yeah! Another great 1/43 build ... certainly one to follow!

[davesans]

Great work love the mods your doing it's really going to make a big different in the end.

[SeanyG]

Saint,

excellent your back... I will look forward to this one progressing. Mind blowing to think this is 1/43rd though. Brilliant prep work and as thorough as always. Rivetting Stuff!

[robrex]

I'm hooked!

[cinqster]

The place has gone Porsche mad! I'm going to camp out here.

[sjelic]

Originally Posted by robrex

I'm hooked!

Me to

[pawlie]

More updates please!

[jaykay640]

O.k. guys here comes another update already! Thanks for your comments!

First up….Sean….i’m not Saint:-) That’s the other german dude with an eternal McLaren project…

Cinqster….did you ever get the PM I sent you about your Porsche project? Not that I need a reply….just wondering:-)

On to the GT1! I carried on with body modifications/corrections.
In the next picture you can see the reworked air outlet from the front cooler, front splitter/bumper and the brass tube for the axle that I installed with body filler.





Then I realized though that I had made a mistake with this white wedge you can see in front of the wheel arch. That thing was on the kit but not really nice. So I replaced it with styrene and made the shutline….only to find out a little later that these were only used for added downforce on short FIA races but not at Le Mans….so they had to go again!
I also started cleaning and deepening the shut lines and the air ducts in front of the cockpit and on the roof. Then I went on to the windows.





These kits usually come with a glass piece that you’re supposed to glue in from the inside
But that’s not right because the glass ( or Perspex ) windows are usually put on from the outside. So I wanted to change that!
I started by thinning out the material thickness around all the windows which led to the A-posts becoming a lot thinner. In the process I also reworked the window graphics because they were a bit flat especially at the top. Then I glued in from the inside strips of 0,2mm sheet styrene. These were then filed to follow the window graphics to create a constant flange to put the glass pieces on.





So far so good….but not good enough! ( Homer voice on ) Dohh! ( Homer voice off )
Only when I was done with that I checked my reference a bit closer and realized the side windows were in fact wrong.
On the model I still had window frames but the real car didn’t! No roll down windows, so they were just fixed on the frame from the outside like at the front. See the real one:





So I went on and took the frames away. I could have saved all the work adding the styrene strips from the inside if only I had looked a bit closer at the pictures to begin with!





Next up you have a picture of the resin body’s underside. I cleaned it up, straightening edges and lines and filling up dents and holes with body filler.





That’s an area that will mostly be invisible once the model is finished but I would always think about that mess when looking at it later :-)

Next I made a new floor for the model. This kit ( as most of that type do ) came with a white metal plate. I don’t like these. They are usually at least a bit warped and you have to make them straight and fit the body. Also I don’t like the makers emblems and stuff that are usually cast into these….that’s so die-cast :-)
Here’s a picture of mine made from renshape ( styrene would do the job as well ) together with a replacement diffusor.






I decided to make that from 0,2mm brass instead of styrene because of the round shape at the edges. Styrene would be quite difficult to convince to stay in that shape :-)
The vertical fins in the middle were soldered on. In the end the whole assembly is much stronger than plastic! Here you see it in place:





That was it for the major body modifications and it was time to prime the pieces and see what I had done in lovely uniform grey :-)





I used 2K-automotive primer for that again.





Sometimes I think a kit should come ready to be primed like that from the manufacturer …well they’re not all Hiros…and I have worse :-)





That’s it for now. More to come!

[klutz_100]

Excellent read and work

Bummer on the window surrounds but you made up for it with that fantastic diffuser.

You are sure that you didn't make a mistake in the thread title? Shouldn't that be 1:24?

[pawlie]

Looks great...the diffuser's especially good


Did anybody ever make this car in 1:24? I thought I had seen one at a show...

[Decs0105]

Originally Posted by SeanyG

Saint,
excellent your back...

Originally Posted by jaykay640

First up….Sean….i’m not Saint:-) That’s the other german dude with an eternal McLaren project…

Seany...Seany... how on earth could you mix us two up? Jay's McLaren is way smaller



Ohh and by the way I think I already saw that build somehow, magic power maybe mhhh ?

But just to warn all of you guys, buckle your seat belts... the finished thing will blow you away... and I'm not kidding...