My first Ferrari! I’ve never been interested in building any exotic cars up until now since there’s usually not many options for customization, and building a stock body Lambo or Pagani seems so boring to me when they’re so commonly made as diecasts and toys. I’m aware Aoshima is producing out-of-the-box Liberty Walk Lamborghinis now, but of course I’d be most interested in an aftermarket resin transkit widebody.
Fujimi seems to be the producer with the rights to the most Ferrari models – I was surprised to see even the box is extra as hell, being in all-red unlike a standard boxart – they really want to make Ferraris feel special, I guess.
Body comes in white plastic, with the front bumper molded as part of the main shell and the rear bumper and skirts separate.
It’s still a Fujimi kit, so parts count isn’t very high, as per the norm. The chassis and interior parts all come molded in this light brown, presumably to match the option color of the tan interior.
Lol at parts like the brakes and engine plenum also coming out of the box in tan because they share the same runner as the interior pieces.
Small chrome runner includes pedals, paddle shifters, exhaust, mirrors, and…the brake calipers? Everything else I can mostly get why they’d include in chrome, but why the calipers? They’re not chrome on the stock car?
Small decal sheet included with all the prestigious prancing horse badging. I imagine licensing the use of these badges officially cost more than the development of the kit itself.
I only decided to build a 458 now because I saw Scale Stars had a resin Liberty Walk transkit available for it. Yes, I choose my builds based on what bodykits are available for cars on the aftermarket.
The transkit includes a replacement front bumper, two overfenders per side, a front splitter, a replacement rear diffuser, a duckbill trunk, and…two small shards? I have no idea what those two small pieces are meant for, and I couldn’t identify them in Scale Stars’ sample photos for this kit, so I opted to just ignore them.
At first I could barely even tell a difference between the Liberty Walk bumper and the OEM bumper, but it turns out the center grille insert is subtly changed. The overall shape is pretty much the same. Either way, since the original plastic bumper was molded as one part with the body, I had to cut that out with a heat knife in order to mount the ScaleStars resin piece.
Overfenders next. Most everything actually fit extremely well right out of the box! I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of massaging and heat gunning needed to get these fenders to line up with the stock body panels – unlike the last resin widebody transkit I worked on.
The fenders all line up and slot right over the factory fenders, but after looking up real images of actual Liberty Walk kitted 458s, it appears that there’s less of a step transition where the lower rear section of the fenders bolt to the body – I imagine it’s more pronounced here with that edge because of the limitations of printing a resin piece that thin. Either way, it’s an easy task to just sand down the bottom edge to make it a thinner and smoother transition from the stock bodywork to the overfenders.
The stock 458 uses 20 inch wheels all around (staggered, of course), right off the factory floor, so I knew if I was going to go with aftermarket wheels, I needed some big boys to have it look proper. Thankfully ZoomOn does offer a few of their wheels in large sizes – I decided to go with a set of 20″ SSR GTX03s, with metal barrel lips.
The faces are separate from the barrels to make for easy painting, though I wish they also had separate lugnuts the way Fugu Garage does for most of their wheels.
Body kit all glued in and test fitted with the wheels.
Apparently the 458 came with a very many different interior options – you could get the dash in all black, black and tan, like 3 different shades of blue, red, on and on. I intended to keep this interior fairly simple, so I decided to just go with an all-black dash with tan seats.
I didn’t plan to replace the seats anyway, but it’s kind of annoying when Fujimi does stuff like this and molds the seat bottoms into the interior tub. The door cards are all part of it as one piece too, meaning filling in small cabin details and painting in general is just harder. If I wanted to replace the seats I would’ve had to cut the original seat bottoms out of the tub, leaving holes that I’d have to fill in the floor first before I even thought about throwing Brides or Recaros in.
I had some tan flocking laying around, so I thought heck why not.
Adding in the small details on the dash and steering wheel via brush paint. I added a small bit of carbon fiber decal to the top of the gauge cowl since that would be visible once the car was all put together.
Stripped the chrome off the chrome parts I mentioned earlier by soaking them in Purple Power degreaser for an hour. That stuff works wonders for quickly getting chrome plating off plastic parts without harming the plastic itself.
The way Fujimi designed these wheel hubs and brakes is quite interesting – the rear hubs have the rear of the brake calipers molded with them, which means after I painted them silver I had to go in by hand with a brush to bring out the color of the yellow calipers.
The front of the calipers were their own separate pieces (in chrome as I pointed out earlier) that I stripped and painted the same yellow. The rotors are then sandwiched between the front and rear caliper halves, meaning it’s more of a real car brake system than most models out of the box.
Body primed and ready for color. I did go in and re-scribe certain panel lines like the doors just to make sure they were plenty deep and still showed crisp after multiple coats of paint.
Ferraris should always be red, don’t @ me.
I really debated about painting the roof and A-pillars black or keeping them red, but ultimately decided to just do it since my own Evora is running this color scheme, so it has a soft spot in my heart.
First time seeing it all in color, with the wheel faces painted bright silver. At first glance, I’m actually not really feeling this – the wheels are too silver, and the fitment puts me off – I think the tires are too thick, it doesn’t look stanced and low enough, even if this is just a mock-up.
The 20″ tires that came with the SSR wheels are meant for them, but I decided to go rummaging in my parts bin and pulled a set of rubber 19″ stretched Hankook tires – with some pushing and pulling, they did fit over the 20″ barrels.
They’re not the proper width for these wheels, but to heck with that – you won’t be able to see the bit of inner barrel sticking out on the inside after it’s all assembled anyway, right? Right??
Ohhhh this works a lot better. The stretched sidewall lets me tuck a bit more of the tire under the fenders naturally, and the overall smaller diameter means the whole car sits just a tad lower, and that makes all the difference in its stance. Rusteze approves.
Changing up the all-silver faces by adding a light twinge of gunmetal, just to give it that bit of extra contrast to make it a little more visually interesting than all-silver.
Fujimi does give you an engine in this kit, which is rare for them, but in true Fujimi fashion, it feels like they only included it because the 458 has a glass rear window that looks into the engine bay, so they had to have it there since it can be seen from outside the car.
The whole motor is made up of like, four pieces – the block itself is just that silver chunk shown above, plus these two valve covers that I painted in Italian Red like the body, and filled in the details with brush paint by hand.
And the last piece is the iconic Ferrari intake plenum that sits on top of the motor. Fujimi includes this as just one piece (originally molded in tan no less!), so after masking and painting the two halves red and black, I’m filling in the rest of the silver details by hand.
Despite being made up of only a handful of pieces, the motor doesn’t look half bad once it’s all painted up. The rear engine lid doesn’t open or anything, so this thing will only be on display at a very surface level.
I originally wasn’t going to even use the new Liberty Walk replacement rear diffuser since…it’s pretty much the same as the stock diffuser, just with two less diffuser fins on each side? The shape is the exact same, so I thought it was pretty silly to go through the effort of cutting out the original diffuser off the chassis plate just to put in a piece that’s nearly identical but missing four fins.
Turns out, the Liberty Walk diffuser is ever so slightly longer than the stock unit, meaning it has a small step edge that pokes out further than the bottom of the bumper – so fineeeee, I’ll paint it and install it.
I knew I wasn’t going to ruin a Ferrari with a bolt on widebody and not run it with a giant obnoxious wing. I thought this deserved something crazier than my usual run-of-the-mill Voltex GT Wing, so enter ZoomOn models with a reverse swan neck wing meant for an Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II.
I debated a lot between doing the wing in all carbon, all color matched, or maybe my usual M.O. of color matched deck with carbon endplates – but decided last minute to flip that on its head, with color-matched endplates and a carbon deck.
ZoomOn includes the actual wing foil itself as a resin piece, with the reverse swan neck stands in photo-etched metal. They are rather thin to feel like scale-accurate wing stands, but I’m hoping getting some paint on them will make them feel less like paper-thin pieces of metal.
There are no pre-stamped or indented mounting points for the stands on the top of the wing deck, so putting this together on the car is going to be an entirely freehand eyeball affair.
As I’m about to install the brake hubs onto the wheel faces…I find out that the metal 20″ wheel barrels are too small to fit the gigantic Ferrari calipers?! I’ve been had!
Absolutely gutted, after I spent all that effort to paint all those pieces for the Ferrari brakes. There’s really no way to fix this issue other than to just go with another set of smaller brakes, since I can’t shave down the metal barrels, and I’d need to nearly cut half the original calipers off in order to squeeze them into the barrels.
I don’t even remember where any of these parts originally came from – I just have a bunch of spare rotors, calipers, and brakes in my parts bin, so I rummaged these up since they fit inside the SSR barrels. I could’ve just painted the flat brake disks with the molded calipers and called it a day, but I wanted that extra bit of detail, so I cut out the molded calipers on all these units and replaced them with the individual brembo calipers that were already painted gold.
Repainted the calipers the yellow I was originally going to go with on the Ferrari brakes anyway, added brembo water slide decals I had laying around, and done! It’s a tight fit inside the barrels still, but no caliper shaving or cutting needed.
Remember when I said having inner barrel sticking out past the tire was fine because you wouldn’t see that with the car put together? Yeah, I lied. Whatever metal these things are made out of is actually surprisingly tough – I thought it would be as easy as cutting up Hot Wheels diecast bodies to cut these barrels down, but it took me a good hour going at it with a dremel cutting wheel to thin down these wheels.
Window frits painted black by hand – Fujimi doesn’t include masking stickers or anything.
I wasn’t even thinking about modifying the exhaust until I looked at it after the body was nearly done and thought the triple tips were kind of strange. And of course being an exotic Italian machine, the exhaust isn’t just hanging out the back where I can just tack a fart can on at the last minute – there’s a specific oval opening in the bumper for it, and in this case Fujimi had molded the three exhaust outlet holes into the bumper opening, which means if I wanted to change it at all I’m going to have to cut those areas out with a heat knife.
After looking up some aftermarket 458 exhaust setups, it seems like it’s mildly common for people to move from the stock triple tip setup to a more traditional dual tip, which is what I’ll be going for here. Luckily I had a set of these smaller 110mm muffler/tip sets from Hobby Design laying around.
Bit of a tight squeeze, but they fit! The fart cans will just be hanging out behind the bumper, not connected to anything, since this model never never had a full exhaust system anyway.
The rear of the 458 has mesh vents that flow into the taillights – Fujimi just molded this detail with a slight mesh pattern in the plastic and expects you to paint it in black – which is what I did at first, but found that it looked really meh. Longtime readers will know that I always like to use real mesh whenever possible, so I’m doing what I should’ve done before I painted the body – cutting out the taillight mesh areas with a heat knife to make way for installing actual mesh.
Despite doing the cutting after paint, it still ended up mildly clean with some touch up paint around the edges. Fujimi gives you the taillight units as just singular half-conical pieces that glue onto the body. I painted the inside of the clear taillight lenses red and chrome’d the areas they glue onto with Molotow chrome paint.
This Ferrari has quite a few mesh vent holes throughout its body, so we’re using it for the taillight sections, the intake vents behind the windows, the front bumper grilles, and the tiny little vents at the bottom of the headlights, which I also cut out with a heat knife, as it used to be filled in with the same mesh-textured plastic.
And finally, the last bit – 48 1mm rivets, placed by hand. This was probably one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of this build, especially as I began to run out of rivets – whenever I lost one or it flew out of my tweezers, it was lost forever – these things are pretty much specs of dust.
“Ask a child to draw a car, and certainly he will draw it red…with an egregious bolt on widebody, a wing bigger than Italy, and slammed on its nuts” – Enzo Ferrari
I had actually never properly dry fitted or tested this wing on this car before final assembly – so truly I wasn’t sure if it would work or it would just look outrageously dumb. I think we landed somewhere in-between, yes?
The rivets used on the widebody are actually mostly leftovers from other Hobby Design transkits that I never used them on – like the Ridoux Mk. IV Supra kit. Unfortunately, I did actually run out and wasn’t able to complete all 48 with just those smaller rivets, so I ended up using a different wider head style for the six rivets on the trailing edge of the front fenders.
I do enjoy how predominantly the motor is on display through the rear glass – too bad it doesn’t open, though to be honest looking at the clearance from the giant wing deck, I’m not sure if the rear hatch will actually clear it if it could open :’)
The fitment doesn’t annoy me as much as I thought it would – usually I’m a real stickler about having the front and rear gaps match, but in this case I was only able to get the rear tires flush with the fender lip. The front fenders didn’t have as much room underneath them to tuck tires up that close, so what you see above is the most aggressive I could get them.
I promise you it’s not just shitty fitment on the edges of the hood and headlights – those little black slits are actually precision Italian-engineered vents.
Ironically my insistence on going with thinner, stretched tires kind of backfired on the final product – the rear wheels are pushed out so far and there’s no fender covering the bottom edge of the rear bumper, so you can pretty clearly see that it’s on some skinny wheels. Any further and you’d be able to see the inside edge of the tires.
I’m only realizing now that I have the tires mounted the wrong way (they’re opposite directional left and right). D’oh! Whatever, it’s a stance car, who cares about tread direction anyway right?!
I had originally called this build done with a very orange peeled finish – especially on the doors and overfenders, you could very easily see the peel – such is the limitation of still using spray cans – to get a truly deep smooth gloss finish I really need to commit to sanding and buffing up a shine, but that carries its own significant risks of burning through paint. I ended up going in with 2000 grit to bring the clear coat down and buff it back up with plastic polish – thankfully avoided burning through any edges!
Enzo is absolutely rolling in his grave. Grazie, ragazzi!
