More Slot Car Madness: A Fly Ferrari 512S Codalunga with HRS2 chassis...

Next on "Slot Car Madness", I present one of my longest running projects so far that is yet to be concluded. I'm really fond of Classic Cars, really. Specially the Le Mans legends, even the ones that failed to win. The Ferrari 512S "Codalunga" is one of my favorites: the looks on this car mix both the oddity and the need for speed. Plus, it's a Ferrari, a true prancing horse, no doubt.

A few months ago, when I visited a private club's track in Braga, I was almost knocked out from my feet when I saw for the first time a slot track with permanent scale lighting... I imagined the kind of races you could get there, specially since the track was built on the living room of an unused apartment: you can run "night races" even if the sun is at high noon!

So, the idea that popped into my head was re-enacting the great night racing from the Le Mans 24 Hours, but in old-fashion 60's or 70's cars! Every time I see the Steve McQueen's "Le Mans", the thing that strikes me on the night scenes, is that you can't see anything else apart from the headlights that seem to move on nowhere! I really admire those guys that had to do the full 5km Hunadieres straight without seeing anything that was a couple of inches away from their own noses...

Luckily for slot car enthusiasts, many slot car brands have dedicated some of their efforts to bring us those kind of legends. I saw the Fly's Ferrari 512S Codalunga "#5 1970 Test Car" on sale with reduced price, so I decided to grab it. I knew some of the flaws of this car, so I decided for something not too common with classic slot cars: fitting it a HRS2 chassis.

As you can see, the project is still far from finished, but the chassis is already assembled. What took most of my dedicated time on this car was the fitting of the lights kit. I purchased some very affordable kits from Amoslot (www.amoslot.de), these are very simple to build if you have some basic notions on electronic components and soldering skills (they are sold with very easy to follow instructions, by the way).

Fitting some lights to this car proved more difficult than initially imagined. The huge headlights from the 512S are big enough to house a 5mm LED. The light kits come with 3mm LED, but I replaced with the bigger ones. Another of the striking features from the 512S are the small lights at the center, and I decided to light'em up too with some small LEDs (I don't know the type, it's the ones used on cell phones). As for the rear section, I was not willing to spoil the small rear lights, so I placed the red LED a bit to the inside, with some rubber insulation from electric cabling to limit the spreading of the light.

Here are the views from the front and rear:

And this is the messy look from the wiring under the body, with the detail on the front section:

Although I don't show on the photos, I can assure you that the lights are functional. I still have to decide a couple things on the mechanical side, so that I can solder the system onto the motor and it the track with this red beast...

So far I managed to convince some other enthusiast to build their own HRS-Classics, so that we can have enough ones for that special night race - the track only has 4 lanes, so we don't need many cars!

To finish another report on odd things in my world of slot cars, I present you the next project in line... not hard to guess what I will do from this: