Round 2 has reissued the Polar Lights 1/25 scale Mr. Norm’s 1969 Supercharger Funny Car. For those who don’t know, Mr. Norm’s Grand Spaulding Dodge dealership in Chicago, Illinois, was one of a few well-known automotive muscle-car tuners and modifiers of the ’60s and ’70s. The dealership would take the already potent Mopar muscle cars of the era and produce some of the hottest and most sought-after street and strip cars ever to be offered to the public.
As has become commonplace with modern kits, all of the part trees are bagged individually, but the parts all come from the original tooling. However, Round 2 completely recreated the decals for the Supercharger to allow you to model different versions of the car depending upon which event it appeared. The box art is new, too, created from clearer images of the funny car on race day.
To start, the Supercharged Hemi comprises 23 parts and a three-piece transmission attaches to the rear motor plate. The mold lines and flash on the chrome parts reveals the age of the tooling. Unfortunately, correcting the flash proved too much to retain the parts’ chrome plating. My references showed the real car didn’t have much chrome, and that’s what I used as a guide to paint the engine. Despite the chrome, the engine was a pleasure to build. Note the front engine cover (Part 53) is reversed in the instructions; turn it around to mount it correctly.
If you’ve built Funny Cars before, the Supercharger chassis will be fairly simple. However, for a neophyte, the instructions are rather vague regarding some attachment points. Once again, I stripped most of the chrome parts and painted with the appropriate metallic paints to achieve the correct look. The rear-end assembly was a little tricky to get aligned correctly, and I removed the locating pins for the rear axle to achieve the correct height on the ladder bars. Careful test-fitting revealed where the cockpit and engine installed on the frame.
The old-school tires came as two-part vinyl slicks that I could not square up no matter what I tried—perhaps due to the age of the molds. I assembled the rear slicks, attached them to my rotary tool, and sanded them square.
The well-proportioned body needed hardly any cleanup, but I ran into some trouble with the glass. Where the glass attached to the sprue turned out to be thick and distorted. To fix this, I made a mounting frame around the edge of the glass from Bare-Metal Foil. The kit includes side glass for the car, which I used. But in reality, the actual car did not have side windows and can be left off for accuracy.
Dupli-Color, Testors, and Alclad II colors worked well on the chassis and drivetrain. For the body, I chose Tamiya Mica Red Metallic (No. TS-39) over a Gold (No. TS-84) base, and I think it worked well to represent the Funny Car as depicted on the box top. The decals worked unbelievably well and laid perfectly flat without setting solution. As a final touch, I airbrushed Axalta Nason two-part automotive clear over the body.
The Polar Lights Mr. Norm’s 1969 Supercharger Funny Car is a rewarding build that does represent the actual car fairly well. This kit is well suited for builders with knowledge of Funny Cars and requires moderate modeling skills to satisfactorily accomplish.