At this point, the car was starting to take shape. This next photo shows that everything except the roof and deck lid were mounted, albeit the rest still needed some serious massaging:
This rear view demonstrates what Freddy Mercury really had in mind when he wrote Fat Bottomed Girls. Maybe I should call the car Fanny:
To blend the narrow cabin with those wide hips takes a bit of creative body work. The one-piece fibreglass roof panel which includes the flying buttresses (or sail panels), the A-pillars, and the rear window frame does all the magic work. It’s bugaboo of a panel to get right since it has to fit tightly around all five windows, completely encapsulate the metal sail panels while making a continuous swooping roof line from the hood to the deck lid, and sculpt a complimentary line to frame the side windows.
It was going to be a tough job for the IFG panel to handle considering it had been molded for a stock Fiero chassis. These next photos are the proof of the pudding (disregard the green masking tape for now):
The cut-out for the quarter window was hopelessly large and improperly curved to boot. This was a function of IFG having to keep the roof line high to fit over the stock Fiero’s beefy B-pillar. Then, to reduce the visual weight of the fairing, IFG made the quarter windows large and expected the builder to fabricate custom windows from Plexiglas:
The next problem with the IFG panel was the shape of the rear window cut-out. I have no idea what they were thinking when they molded the opening for the rear glass:
For starters, I don’t know of any stock rear glass shaped like that opening, and if IFG’s intent was for builders to use Plexiglas, then why not make the opening stretch back to a point like that of an authentic F355?
Complicating matters was my having lowered the rear edge of the metal roof, which made the fibreglass rear window opening about 1.5 inches too tall…
… and this contributed to the excessive height of the IFG sail panels as well:
Again, because the IFG panel was made to fit over the stock Fiero metal roof, the rear edge overhung my MR2 window by about 3.75 inches! And that of course pushed the sail panels equally too far back:
Lastly, the IFG roof panel only had short little 3” stubs for the A-pillars. They intended for the customer to graft on their own A-pillars after cutting them off a stock Fiero panel.
From the entire IFG roof assembly, I figured I could only salvage the outboard skin of the sail panels, since even the inboard skins were hopelessly curved and tilted rather than being nearly straight and vertical as on the authentic Ferrari. So I made a cut plan to save as much of the outer sail panel skins as possible:
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I went ahead and chopped the sail panels off the roof skin with a cut-off wheel in the angle grinder:
Then I cut the inboard skin off the sail panels getting rid of the funky rear window shape and the tilted inner skins in one fell swoop:
Next, to drop the height of the sail panel and get the quarter window cut-out closer to the correct shape, I made a diagonal cut following the masking tape I asked you to ignore earlier, like so:
Cutting the base of each sail panel off diagonally resulted in the forward edge of the panel rotating down to a more reasonable roof height. It also rotated the extra large IFG quarter window opening down far enough to partially cover the authentic F355 quarter glass. That allowed me to trace the correct curvature for the opening onto the fibreglass and cut it to the correct shape. I also cut out the fibreglass blocking the scoop for the engine air intake:
Here are the results of my efforts to save something from the IFG roof assembly:
Notice how the quarter window opening now follows the glass, and how the engine air inlet at the back of the window was opened up:
And from the inside view, notice how the forward edge of the sail panels have been dropped down much closer to the level of the metal roof.