[eschaider]

As a general rule of thumb, buyers will get what they pay for. Cobra's that are more expensive, in fact are more expensive for a reason.

There was a time when you could buy a kit and save some money on the overall package by the time you were done. In actual fact your were just trading you time and effort for the difference in dollars.

The number of different disciplines necessary to build a car from scratch are indeed impressive. In the hopper you should include electrician skills, mechanical fabrication skills, drivetrain design, installation and tuning skills, general contractor machinist skills (unless you do your own machine work), engine building and assembly skills, body finishing skills and of course painting skills and those are just the obvious ones for the ante at the builders poker table.

If you can handle some or all of those types of issues you can reduce the amount of money you will need to get the car operational. If you've never done that sort of work then you need to pay someone who knows how to do it (they tend to be more expensive) do it for you.

While $35K Cobra's can be found they are probably not what you intuitively wanted and the buyer's remorse that sets in after the purchase takes all the fun out of the car until it ends up sitting in your garage for what seems like forever. Then one day you decide to simplify your life and sell the Cobra for pennies on the dollar you spent, to get to the place you did not want to be.

I think your dissatisfaction is less with SPF and more with your election to put off acquiring a car when it was more affordable. Once you make the decision to become a Cobra owner you are signing up for much more than the Detroit built performance cars available today that you can put a new set of wheels and tires on, have a good time and generally feel good about the car.

The sad but true, real world experience is that you are the owner of a modern day replica, of a classic balls out race car, that likely operates at a higher performance level than the original championship cars it is replicating. Most significantly you own the honor / responsibility of both bringing it to life and maintaining it — and almost independent of how you drive it, you most probably aren't ready for what that maintenance regimen implies.


Ed