Is this actually FAH 603 restored or is it a different FG airframe with a Honduran paint job?

Tenuous link I grant

Why do you say it’s a tenuous link? Trumpeter is one of the highest-quality kit manufacturers out there. If they are producing a Whirlwind kit, you can be sure it’ll be a good one.

The many commenters theorizing that this was a napalm dispenser need to realize that napalm (developed at my old university, Harvard) came pretty late to the war. Its very first recorded use was March 1944. Would a P-40 have been dispensing it that late? (I don’t know; you tell me.)

My U. S.Navy friends used to call their seats of that era (1970s) Martin Baker Back-Breakers.

I believe most of those pseudo machine guns are propane-powered and aren’t guns at all. This is technology that was well-developed by Hollywood during the pre-CGI era. Perhaps the Kiwi P-40 is an exception, dunno.

Some members seem to treat the forum as some sort of personal messaging service between mates.

Absolutely true, and for me, it’s the most off-putting thing about the forum. Some of those bozos even require me to know Cockney rhyming slang.

Presages the fact that after the war, many belly tanks were turned into “lakesters”–very fast straight-line-speed record cars driven on the dry lakes of California and Nevada (Bonneville being the best-known one). Rather than a single-cylinder APU engine like this one, they were typically powered by Ford flathead V8s, later by big ohv engines. I did an article on them some years ago for Air & Space Smithsonian.