Think SCOOT came up with their latest hood design? You'd be wrong! Here's one for you trivial persuit fanatics...it originally came on a Porsche GT-1, a one off (or only one of two I believe) that featured all-wheel drive. It was made specifically for the Sultan of Brunai. Worthless info, but interesting! It's amazing how much Japanese tuners emulate European automobiles. Check out the Rotary Run Racing hood sometime. It's influence? F50.
Michel

 

This one

I actually noticed that on a box for a slot car track that we had at the hobby store I work at a few weeks ago and was like WHOA, I'll be damned.

 

Son of a gun!!
I SAW the GT1 in person at the Porsche event in Lime Rock, and I NEVER noticed the resemblence.

 

I was a bit surprised as well! I noticed it yesterday on Speedvision. They had some sort of road rally where every car was $250 and up including a few prototypes like the BMW NAZCA show vehicle. I guess they used those hoods on al the GT-1's, not just the four (not two) AWD models made. If it's good enough for the McLaren F1-eating GT-1, it's good enough for Scoot :-)
Michel

 

I just ran and grabbed my pictures from when the FIA cars ran in Sebring back in '97 and found the Porsche GT1. Sure enough, that's the hood. I scanned the picture and put it below. If anyone wants to see any of the other cars (McLaren GT1, Mercedes CLK-GTR, Lotus GT1, Marcos, Viper GT-2, Panoz GT1, Banzai RX-7 back in '97, or silver street stock RX-7), let me know and I'll scan those in and post them. Here's the Porsche.....

 

no way.. do you guys see the fenders on that? isnt that the same design as the re amemiya front fenders??

 

Maybe the RE-A car needs the Scoot hood?!

 

Yeah I noticed that too actually..their new AD-GT kit is a bit different from the earlier version but both use the principal (now I'm not well versed on this so no flames) of smoothing the airflow coming off the rear wheels to lower turbulence and drag. The smoother the transition off the rear tire to the rear of the wheel well, the better. All the F1 teams test in wind tunnels which feature the ability to move the wheels while the car remains stationary. Moving wheels make big changes in how the air flows around the car.

 

I'm not really educated on this but isn't the Porche engine located in the back? ...then wouldn't that make the hood vents non-functional? It looks great, but is that the only reason the hood is styled like that?

 

The radiator is in the front, so the vents are to pull the hot air out of the radiator. Since the car was designed first as a race car, and then a street version was made, the scoop in the middle COULD have been used to pull cool air into the driver as sort of an A/C, but I seriously doubt it was (although I believe they ran with the windows up, so it's still possible).

I just remembered I have a 1/18th scale model of a 911 GT1 and pulled it out. See pic below..

 

On the RACE car I think the center scoop was used to cool the POWER STEERING (yes most modern race cars use power steering to overcome the high steering loads caused by HIGH DOWNFORCE and STICKY TIRES!) on the 4wd cars it also was used to cool the front diff.