Make Your Own Mad Max Interceptor From A "Ferrari"
A toy Ferrari hacked together with kitchen and office equipment makes for one wicked balcony toy.
We're sitting at a vast dining table, my friend Máté and I, idly racing a toy Ferrari in the shadow of salmon sandwiches, and he says, hey, let's turn that Ferrari into a Mad Max Interceptor Pursuit Special.
The Ferrari is an F430 Challenge, sans Stradale, the racing version of the basic F430, and you can get one at Shell gas stations with your purchase of gasoline (and candy bars), at least here in Europe you can. It's palm-sized and comes with a pullback motor which is synched with a speaker emitting a rather faithful engine noise. I know because I have a 250 GTO and the sound is vastly different, modern flat-plane V8 versus vintage racing 3.0-liter V12.
We'll skip the hood-mounted supercharger as there's nothing to supercharge up front, same with the sidepipes and the ghetto black paintjob, but we can't skip the tanks. On the original Pursuit Special, the tanks stored scarce gasoline, a substance which is indeed getting scarce but which unfortunately does not come in tiny canisters.
What does come in tiny canisters is nitrous oxide, the mother of all dual-use technology, used in dentistry for anaesthesia, in car tuning for, well, you know what, and in the kitchen to make whipped cream. Nitrous oxide is extremely soluble in fat, as in the fat of whipping cream, enabling the user to create whipped cream twice the volume than with air.
Nitrous oxide in cars is usually labelled NOS after Holley Performance Products' Nitrous Oxide Systems but my mother is a chemical engineer and she would disapprove of that, so we'll go with the chemical formula N20. With a dab of overhead marker and a strip of Scotch tape, the car is ready to rock and roll.
Ready, I lied, but not quite. The heavy N20 canisters are overloading the pullback motor, making the car extremely sluggish. And you can't have an F430 Challenge Interceptor Pursuit Special associated in any way with that dreadful adjective. What we'll need is an ultra-precise double-barreled nailgun which fires two pins in high sync to rupture both nitrous canisters at the same time, creating in the process a nitrous-powered jet car.
If you have such a nail-gun handy, Jalopnik Nitrous Initiative would like to hear from you.
Photo Credit: Máté Petrány and the author