The Revell 1/16 scale Hawaiian Charger Funny Car is a re-release of a kit first available in 1988. The kit is a representation of Roland Leong’s 1973 Dodge Charger “Hawaiian” Funny Car. These cars were essentially a rail or tube chassis with a modified fiberglass body representing the car – by this point in racing history a Funny Car had little in common with the stock car it represented other than a vague similarity and a name. In fact, the origin of the name ‘Funny Car’ comes from the elongated wheelbase and stretched bodywork – far from looking stock, they looked ‘funny’ and the name stuck.

This is a large, 1/16 scale kit, so it comes in an associated larger model box – this one measuring 11 ½ x 17 inches. It needs to be big, because the stretched Dodge Charger body is pretty long, just shy of 12 inches when completed.

Most of the sprues are in white plastic. The body is mostly one-piece, with caps for each end, so it should go together easily. The clear parts are separately bagged, and the windshield is detailed with rivets as seen in the photo on the box cover.

Apart from the body, the three white sprues have the parts that make up the engine, chassis, and cockpit. The castings have a few injector-pin marks here and there, as well as some molded-in copyright notices that will need to be cleaned up, but nothing too terrible given the age of the original molds.

This is a drag car, so there’s lots of chrome, and the chrome sprue is very large. Some of the larger parts such as the valve covers look pretty good and could be used right off the sprue. Unfortunately, many of the chome parts look pretty rough, like the chrome was not properly adhering to the plastic. It’s especially evident on the smaller chrome parts – they have a rough, or sometimes sandy look, so some parts would definitely benefit from stripping and repainting with a metalized paint.

The rubber tires look very good, and with a little effort should be fairly realistic.

Since this is a large-scale model, details such as plug wires and other plumbing would be missed, and the kit includes a bag of tubing and wire to do basic detailing on the engine. A motivated modeler would no doubt find many other areas that would benefit from more detail.

The decals are clear and well-registered, and done is such a way that minimizes the need for masking and painting the body. A single color of gloss blue on the bodywork is all that is required, and the decals take care of the alternate colors.

All in all a nice, big model of an interesting car.

Thanks to Revell and Hobbico for providing the review kit, and to IPMS USA for allowing me to review it.