How’s this for a fun little thought experiment: Say you had a time machine to go back to a certain year and grab that long-lost, super-rare plastic kit all shiny and new. Might you go back to 1960 to snatch up an ITC F-108 in a fresh, original box? Maybe a Monogram 1/32 scale Sturmpanzer, not produced since 1973? Or perhaps an original Airfix Ferguson tractor?
Nostalgia trips are all well and good, but entirely pointless in the case of the original MPC Grumpy Jenkins ’72 Vega. Honestly, that kit was a joke, even by the standards of the day. This latest version, retooled enough to stretch “reissue” to its limits, is an order of magnitude more serious.
Still, you should still temper your expectations because this is fundamentally tooling that goes back half a century. You get a chassis plate with a molded-in suspension and the rudimentary tubbed interior that started with the ’74 Bruce Larson Vega and carried all the way through the latest “Twister” car before this release. The 21 parts in the engine make up a serviceable Chevy big-block V8, but Grumpy’s Toy mainly ran small-blocks.
What’s new, however, is mightily impressive. The original stock Vega body shell, crudely hacked for slicks, gives way to a newly tooled ’72 body with properly stretched rear wheel arches. The new pad-printed, Firestone-branded, soft, vinyl slicks are slightly wide for scale but vastly superior to what came before. And there’s simply no contest with the new decal sheet, containing comprehensive graphics for both Grumpy’s white car and the briefly-run red-sided racer. There are slight scale discrepancies between sponsors, and the black pinstripes don’t hug the wheel arches as they should, but there’s just no faulting the registration and sharpness of each marking.
Fifty years hence, domestic manufacturers haven’t quite worked out tolerance stack issues in new tooling, so you can bet this little chunk of the 1970s has its share. For me, the windshield/backlight piece didn’t settle without a superglue beatdown, which keeps the interior bucket from seating neatly inside the body shell, which pushes the chassis plate below the rocker panel line.
Put the battery in as directed and it butts against the separate radiator core support, skewing the chassis backward of proper passenger-side alignment against the body. The oil filter isn’t mentioned in the instructions; it should be painted Fram orange. The driver’s side header kicks the engine out of alignment in the chassis.
But if you tailor your outlook to suit a fancy curbside, and you go into battle ready to give your knives, files, and Dremel heads a workout, the model more than cleans up. The new body resembles its subject with satisfying accuracy. The new slicks and graphics do the kit every favor in the world. And once you’ve ground away all the clearance issues, the model crouches in that singular ’70s compact Pro Stock stance. All right here, right now! No paradoxes or potential “butterfly effects” necessary.
I would recommend this kit for experienced modelers. Even with the new tooling, it has challenges that will prove frustrating to novices without guidance from more seasoned builders. But in the hands of someone who’s been around the block, Grumpy’s Vega can turn into a cool addition to your car collection.