Gran Turismo
Personalized "Kit Car"

• Original year: 1973
• Company: Revell
• Scale: 1/25
• Designer: n/a

The Gran Turismo (GT) represents the growing popularity for "kit cars" in America. More and more car enthusiasts are building their own personalized automobiles from a kit designed to utilize a popular foreign car chassis. The VW floor pan/chassis is the most popular set-up for adapting fiberglass body kits. Today you can purchase kits for sport roadsters, dune buggies, or GT cars.

The Gran Turismo represents a new breed of GT kit cars. It is a low, muscular sport body fitted to a sectioned VW floor pan. Suspension is modified Volkswagen with Empi mag wheels on superwide low-profile Goodyear racing tires. Power is supplied by 1800CC's of VW four-cylinder engine complete with dual Weber carburetors and Cyclone headers. The transaxle is designed to also receive the six-cylinder Corvair engine. The interior includes full instrumentation, sport steering wheel, and racing bucket seats with Targa headrests.

The Gran Turismo turns a mild-mannered VW sedan into a high-performance sports car. This allows the car enthusiast to personalize a car to fit his needs and be able to have such a cat for half the cost of a production sports car of the same class.

Dave's comments:

Who says you can't have your own show rod? You sure could try by customizing one of these "kits" in the early 70s! This is a 1998 reissue.