There is something vicarious about building a model like the IMSA Ferrari 365 GT4 BB, but not in the way people usually mean it. It is not about pretending you own the car. It is about pretending you are responsible for it. Those are very different fantasies.
The real Ferrari 365 GT4 BB did not end up in IMSA because Ferrari wanted it there. It ended up there because someone decided to try anyway. Someone looked at a complicated Italian road car and decided to strip it. Cage it. Stretch the fenders. Tune the engine so it lives long enough to see the checkered flag instead of a country club. That was the whole program. Belief backed by work.
When you sit down with a vintage Gunze Sangyo kit, you are dropped into that same headspace. Nothing clicks together perfectly. The parts are a little stubborn. The instructions assume you have done this before or at least that you are willing to figure it out. You make choices immediately. Motor or no motor. Perfect paint or something that looks like it has been wiped down with a rag that already had oil on it. You are not following orders so much as negotiating.
That is the vicarious part. You are not driving the car. You are solving it.
Building the model feels closer to building the real IMSA car than people want to admit. Both are about compromise. This fits but barely. That clears but only if you force it. If you change this one thing, three other things now need attention. Progress is not linear. You step back. You stare at it. You leave it alone overnight. The next morning it makes sense.
Gunze understood that feeling. As beautiful as they are the kits were never about reaching perfection. They were about involvement. About the sense that what you were building had intent, even if it only ever lived on a shelf.
When the model is finished, it does not feel just "done". It feels earned. Like you had a hand in bringing something unlikely into existence. Not a Ferrari fantasy, but a privateer one. The kind of victory where just showing up was the win, and the process did the rest.
You can buy this kit, take it out of its cellophane cocoon and build it. Right now. Here:
