A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist

My enthusiasm for Knight Rider is pretty obvious - here's the first car I bought for myself, way back in 1999:

Surprisingly, nobody sells a Knight Rider slot car.  Scalextric did in the 1980s and it was an abomination:

Apparently, Scalextric used the tooling for the Triumph TR7, lengthened the nose and stuck some bits on it.  Consequently, the proportions were all wrong.  I've got one (obviously) but have always been looking for a plastic kit I could convert but these are so rare now and I've never yet seen one for sale.

But I recently discovered a company called Betta & Classic, one of the oldest slot car companies, which manufactures dozens and dozens of lightweight bodies.

I bought a few bodies from them that I'd like to build but can't find anywhere else and the 1984 Pontiac Firebird Transam was the first on the list.  They are very light and so coupled with racing chassis, they'll go very fast.  I prefer a scale speed that looks right on the track so just bought a standard chassis from Pendle to go with it.

The bodies come in thin white plastic or even thinner clear plastic.  Of course, if you buy both, you can cut holes for the windows out of the white version and just pop the clear body up inside for a perfect match.

 First thing to do was paint the gold skirts:

...then mask them off to spray the whole car black:

 With the chassis built and interior painted, it's ready to put together:

This is a much better proportioned model, as you can see below next to the old Scalextric version.  Michael Knight definitely prefers the new model ;-)

So the new car isn't KITT but as well as being a model of the exact version and year that I used to own, there is still a close Knight Rider connection.  (Sorry, this is where it gets really geeky...).

In the pilot episode of Knight Rider, the hero is initially a police officer called Michael Long:

Unluckily for him, the dodgy-looking lady on the right shoots him in the face halfway through the episode.  Luckily for him, he doesn't die, takes on the surname of his saviour Wilton Knight, has reconstructive plastic surgery, and... the Hoff is born.

Michael Knight joins the Foundation for Law and Government (FLAG) and gets issued a black Transam called KITT.  But they chose a Transam because Michael was already familiar with the car because, as you probably guessed by now, Michael Long drove one but in black with gold skirts (which you can just make out in this screen grab):

So the new model represents both my and Michael Knight's first car!