Original Concept & with Permission of:- Dr Dinky
Creator: Dr Dinky

All courtesy goes to Wim van den Berg, Dr Dinky, who lives in the USA but come from the Netherlands for allowing his concept to be turned into this page.

Dr Dinky says :

In March 1968, the Golden Jacks or Take Off Wheels were introduced.
This gimmick is well described in the Great Book of Corgi so I won't go into that. There were two models which were scheduled to have the take off wheels as well: The 344 Ferrari Dino and the 342 Lamborghini Miura.

Due to the pressure from other manufacturers for more free-wheeling cars, Corgi decided (rather unwisely, imo) to re engineer these models to the new Whizzwheels at the last moment. Just imagine what that mistake must have cost. All the revising of molds.

Early boxes were already printed depicting the Golden Jack wheel feature. This was revised by putting a simple sticker over it.

Now comes the question: What would these two models have looked like if they had the Take off Wheels? Could it be done?

I looked at them closely and I discovered that the re-engineering to Whizzwheels only slightly disguised the Golden Jacks. As a matter of fact , the Miura has even a Take Off Wheel under the hood, or bonnet as you Brits say.
I should be possible to reverse engineer it back to Golden Jacks originally intended.

Well, I succeeded. With minimal cutting ( the original slots were clearly visible) I could take a good model and put in the Golden Jack bits I removed from a Mini Marcos ( the only ones fitting), which worked nicely. Only I had to stretch the middle a bit as the Miura and the Ferrari were longer. And I did not even have to repaint the models. When anyone notice: the rivets are a development and trademark of Dr Dinky.

Now to make the effect complete I had to reverse the boxes too.
I took carefully the stickers off , made a copy of the box on which I stuck the sticker again, so I ended up with an original box for my Golden Jack models and another for the Whizzwheels one. I did the same thing for the Ferrari as well.

I had done this conversion in 2000, but I did not know of a Corgi forum where I could tell about it. So there you have it. Two historical models as they should have been all along.