The Ford Mark IV J6
The Ford Mark IV was a 550 hp, 7 litre V8 developed by Ford in conjunction with Carroll Shelby. Known as J6, the car was the 6th incarnation of the Ford "J" car, and a continuation of the Ford GT40 series that dominated 60's road racing. The #2 Ford Mark IV J6 was campaigned by Shelby America at LeMans, driven by Bruce McLaren and Mark Donahue. Despite having captured the pole position, the car finished fourth in the race having lost time in the pits after the rear portion of the body blew off on the while flying down the Mulsanne straight at over 300 km/h. (Note the duct tape holding the rear clip together)
 | The decal set is from H.O. Slot Car Racing of Brookfield, WI. Patto has a set available as well, but they're from the Lemans winning #1 car, which is red, and I wanted to do a yellow car for some colour variety. As for wheels, the Shelby Cobra 427 S/C by Greenlight (pictured at the bottom of the page) comes with a set of wheels that match this car nicely. The knock-offs protrude slightly from the wheel, making it easy to paint them red like the real knock-offs in the picture above. There is no GoodYear script on the tires, and the side walls proved too short to apply any GoodYear decals. I decided to forego the GoodYear script, which like the colour choice, gives the cars a bit of variety. Also, the Cobra (the wheel donor car) came with a small chrome roll bar behind the drivers seat which might work nicely on the Brabham re-creation. |
The diecast used for this restoration (pictured below left) is from a lot of 5 cars purchased on eBay for $10, including shipping. This batch also included the Chaparral restoration car, and the 3 parts cars; another McLaren, another Ferrari, and a Ford "J" car. The interior of the McLaren and the Ferraris windshield from these parts cars were used on the restorations mentioned previously.
Three coats of Tamiya TS-16 Yellow were used on this paint job. Below (right) is a picture of the car after the decals were applied.
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You'll notice the car features the "Gurney Bubble", protruding from the right hand side of the roof. This was a modification made to J5, the red (#1) Lemans winning Gurney/Foyt car. It was added to accomodate the very tall frame of Dan Gurney. Interestingly, after Lemans, all of the 4 Mark IV's were repainted to match the winning car, and the bubble modification was added to each of them to create an exact replica of the winner. When the owner of J6 later discovered he didn't own the winning car as he had thought, he had it restored back to its yellow #2 paint scheme (pictured below), and the Gurney bubble was retained as it was considered an interesting piece of the cars history.
