I learned a lot when I converted my first car to Carrera Universal - the Fly Ferrari 512S was a real success, except it is built so low that only brand new tires will keep the bottom of the car from scraping on the conductors. I had to find a way to lower the Carrera Motor to be flush with the bottom of the car, just like the original carrera cars were built. That meant I had to cut away more of the body donor car's chassis, and the surfaces where to glue the two chassis together would be reduced.

To get the necessary tensile strength at these glued surfaces,I decided to try a different glue: a small hot glue gun was purchased and after a few tests I became quite confident that even imperfect dremel cuts would be fused nicely with the right amount of liquid hot glue

Bottom of the car with Carrera and Fly chassis combined, click on image for large scan

The Panoz is a larger car compared to the Fly Ferrari 512S, so there was more flexibility in what to cut away. The front motor location of the Fly car had to be abandoned - if you want a fat Carrera motor, you need to mount that thing where Carrera put it in the past - mid car, inline, with the original Carrera axle mounts and axle in the original location. Anything else would be torn apart after only a few laps of driving. The victim of this new engine location was the great Fly driver/cockpit insert.

At the point of this writing, the driver insert is still untouched in a bin - I'll have to cut it up real bad real soon, just to get the impression of a driver back behind the windshield. Yet before I get into these cosmetics, I have to make sure everything else works perfectly. After all, the conversion of these cars has only one purpose: to create great looking cars that are actually usable on the track. If I wanted to collect them, I wouldn't cut them up in the first place. So looks, although important and an essential part of the project, are secondary. The car has to be fast and driveable!

An inside view of my second generation Fly/Uni hybrid approach. This used to be a Carrera BMW 3.0 CSL chassis (long wheelbase), but only the core parts needed for the rear axle, motor mount and front guide piece swing arm are left of that. The rest is Fly, with original body mounts

So before finishing the body work, I am making sure that the car handles well. Slight errors in my dremel work have moved the body slightly out of alignment. Some small plastic wedges had to be glued to some chassis locations to have the body tighten down symmetrically. Lack of time tends to make me work too fast at times...

A severe problem is the really poor reliability of the Fly body mount screws. They were messed up before I ever opened the car for the first time. The body mount bolts have cracked and need to be glued. I red somewhere that putting a tight metal sleeve around them will fix the problem and protect them from cracking in the future. In years of working hard on Carrera cars, I had never go a single screw mount bad... But then these cars were heavier and didn't look as good as a Fly car does in 1999/2000. 20 years of plastic moulding advances do show on that body. And the printing of the Visteon paint on the surface is just plain stunning.

This is a view of the car before the driver insert was fitted - it shows how big that 20 volt carrera inline motor is.It will require some major surgery to the driver insert before the car is completed.

The back mounts of the Fly chassis were the most difficult task to line up with the body, since the Carrera chassis ends behind the rear axle. Hot glue came to the rescue, and a quick custom cut piece of plastic let me create a triangular area that was easy to glue, allowing the rear diffusor of the Panoz to be positioned exactly where the body above prescribes it, and the screws now work in back and in front, without having to relocate a single mounting location. My Ferrari conversion did not allow that.

But now to the really good news: the car ran so well in my initial tests, that I am finding myself driving it more and more, putting off the final steps of the conversion. The very low center of gravity, combined with the long wheelbase of the Carrera BMW create a car that handles extremely well, is very controllable when driven at the limit, and is very forgiving when overdriven. Just like any Carrera Universal car, it will still do a 180 degree spin and continue driving so you can whip it around at the next bend without having to get up from your set. yet it doesn't get to that degree of spin very rarely. You can catch it much easier than some of the twitchy short wheelbase cars that just want to do a 360 degree spin at any opportunity.

The front spoiler is rather low and far ahead of the front axle and guide piece, which in the banked turn ("Steilkurve 2" for you German insiders) scrapes rather strongly on the pavement. One time it hooked on the edge of a track piece at full throttle, causing a major crash, throwing the car almost vertically in the air and off the track. The rear wing was easily re-attached...

Here's a photo I got of the real car in 1998 at Laguna Seca, with Doc Bundy at the wheel - click on image for full screen version

The original Fly front tires were retained, while in the back poorly detailed BMW Carrera wheels hold original Carrera rear tires. Custom rear rims and tires would be nice, but I have not found the proper tools to let me adapt Fly rear hubs and tires to the carrera axles. The diameter of the axle doesn't match, and I don't have a micro lathe that would let me whip up the proper parts quickly. After all - I built this car to be driven. Maybe I'll spend more time on adding a nice high output LED lighting system to drive the car in long distance races, rather than worry about what those rims look like...

I have not yet decided what my next conversion will be, but the new Fly Porsche 917 is a definitive candidate. The Porsche 911 Evo GT1 will follow eventually, and the Lola T70 may also get adapted. Once I have a few of these larger cars finished, I may even tackle a Formula 1 conversion. And if I am lucky, one of the new slot car makers will one day create a few current Reynard and Lola champcars. Just imagine how many different paint schemes they could sell without having to make a different mould. I have no idea why they haven't taken advantage of this opportunity to sell even more "collectible" slot cars without having to retool their injection moulds... I for sure would buy every version they'd make!

To find more about Carrera Universal, visit some of these fine web sites (all in German, sorry):

Ingo Winterberg's Carrera Site
Katsche's Hobby: Carrera
Henry Smits-Bode: The Carrera Book
Mike Wahrlich's Carrera Page