Moebius hits another grand slam with their 1961 Pontiac Ventura kit. Little to no flash, excellent fit, and terrific engraving make this a kit worth building. If there’s a downside to the kit, it’s the poor instruction sheet. While printed on glossy paper, I found the instructions incomplete, incorrect, and lacking in detail. More later.

Engine

The engine comes with only a tri-power setup. This is an option for air filter(s) although not covered in the instructions. There’s the large air filter (#79 & 80) or the individual air filters (#93) that are not mentioned in the instructions. I chose to use the #93s. There are 2 heater hoses shown but placement on the engine is not clear at all.

Interior

Moebius did an interior platform with separate side panels and seats that feature wonderful engraving. Detailed painting instructions make for correct color interior.

This is a difficult kit to assemble with some significant fit issues with many of the parts. An old diecast version of this car was previously issued by Protar, and it looks like Italeri worked directly from the diecast kit. The Italeri plastic parts are identical to the Protar diecast parts, including ejection pins and sink marks. It looks like Italeri used the Protar parts to make their molds. This helps to explain some of the rough spots, lack of crisp decal on the parts, and all the nut & bolt fasteners.

This is the latest Batmobile from the Batman vs. Superman Dawn of Justice movie. It is a nice looking vehicle! The instruction booklet is concise and gives great illustrations.

The kit contains

• 8 sprues molded in light grey styrene
• 1 clear sprue
• 4 Black Rubber tires
• 1 instruction booklet.

Construction

The kit is not too complex and can be built in a number of sub-assembles via 8 main steps. The use of sub-assemblies allows you to paint these as you progress through the build. I would recommend that you test fit each part before any glue is used as a few need a little adjusting to fix correctly.

If you needed to tow a really big rig – you would need a really big wrecker! This replica kit does the real thing justice and it’s got pretty good quality for an older mold.

Background

From Italeri’s website: The Fiat 806 Grand Prix adopted significant innovations for its time. The Fiat 806 was, in fact, the “progenitor” of the modern Formula One racing cars. Developed and produced by FIAT, the Italian automobile manufacturer in 1927, it could be considered the first Grand Prix car ever built. Thanks to its 180 HP 12 cylinder engine, the Fiat 806 was able to reach and even exceed the speed of 240 Km/h. However, the most important innovations were made in the development of the chassis, mechanics and bodywork. The engine and gearbox unit was, in fact, located between the two chassis bars in order to optimize the performance and the drivability.