Club Cobra - Kirkham SEMA Show Car

Fellow Car Nuts:

As many of you know, a couple of years ago we auctioned a car off on eBay to raise money for the NYU Downtown Hospital. (The hospital at Ground Zero in New York City). Of course, many people stopped by our booth there in NY, (many thanks to all of you who helped), and one of them was from Ford—the head of marketing and shows. He loved the car and was very kind to show us the GT-40 concept car they had on display in their booth. Time went by...

About a year ago, the same gentleman from Ford Motor Company unexpectedly called us and asked us if we would be willing to put together a special car to display in Ford’s booth at the 2003 SEMA show in Las Vegas. He explained to us Ford was very interested in having the best display possible as Ford would be celebrating their 100th anniversary. Ford asked us to keep the entire idea very secret so their competitors would not get wind of what they were going to do…so, we did. Only our immediate family and our employees ever knew.

At the time, Thomas and I had been kicking around the idea of building a stainless steel chassis for our own show car. Of course, when Ford indicated they wanted a car, we decided to start building the stainless steel chassis immediately for that show car.

We sent word to Poland to start making prototype stainless steel chassis cars in preparation for the SEMA car to be built. A few prototype cars were built and we perfected our methods of manufacture of the stainless steel. Stainless steel is much harder to work than regular steel and quite a bit of tweaking of our process had to be implemented to get things running smoothly.

Building the car was very stressful for us because we knew we were under a time crunch and the car HAD to be ready at a defined date. What if an accident happened? What if? The stress was building and building as the date approached, and we were behind---of course.

The truck driver called on Monday of the week before SEMA and asked if he could come pick up the car. We asked him if he could delay picking up the car and he agreed. My brother Steve asked him how late he could come and he said, “Well, I have family here in Las Vegas, so I could pick it up on FRIDAY!!! What great news! (I guess the driver was in Vegas anyway so it really worked out great. Steve even convinced the driver to pick up the car at 5:00 pm on Friday.

So we worked all week cleaning, detailing, tweaking, etc on the car. Thursday came and we were set to put the suspension on the car when we realized…AGGHHHHH!!!!! We only had one front lower control arm! The other one mysteriously vanished. Well, it was probably never there--I was about to pull my hair out. How could we have forgotten something so important as a front lower control arm! How were we going to hold the front wheel on? Too much stress…

At 8:00 pm on THURSDAY night I called my machinist at home with the bad news and asked him if he could reverse engineer, design, program, proof, and deliver two, functional, billet, front-lower control arms by 3:00 pm the next day. He replied, “I better come in at 6:00 am.” I could see bets secretly being taken against me by some of my employees. (I even had visions/nightmares of the suspension being “borrowed” from my car while I wasn’t looking).

So, we started early on Friday with my machinist working away with calipers and clicking away on the CAD program. I got tied up with other problems and forgot about the control arm. By 2:00 pm I started to hear the first cuts on the mill being made. Miraculously, the first part came out without any gouges or scratches…what a machinist! The second one followed soon after and by 4:00 pm we were bolting on the freshly minted, front-lower control arms on the car.

The entire shop was excited to work on the car. There was a buzz in the air. Finally, the car was finished and we started to load the car onto the trailer, when…our machinist reached into his pocket and pulled out some freshly billeted aluminum emblems and handed them to me! “I thought these would be cool,” he simply replied. AFTER billeting the front lower control arms, he secretly machined a couple of “special” parts for the car—everyone was in on the excitement. Our first car with emblems had finally been completed. The car looked great—but, we couldn’t help but wonder if Ford would like it too.

When we got to SEMA, Ford treated us like kings. They were very kind to us and went well out of their way to help us with anything we wanted or needed. When we first went to see the car, we were excited to meet the head of marketing there in the booth as they were setting up. The Ford booth was immense. We meet him on the far side of the booth. He greeted us warmly and we started to walk to the other end of the display to see our car. As we were walking, he sternly glanced from side to side barking orders to guys to remove cars that weren’t up to standards. He apologized for having to remove “unsightly cars, that weren’t up to Ford’s standards” from the display at such a late date.

He was clearly annoyed by having to replace cars. (In all, I think they removed 7 cars from the display they were not happy with.) Needless to say, I was quite nervous as we approached our car. What was he going to say? When we finally reached our car, I couldn’t believe it. It was still covered—the ONLY car in the entire building that was covered. Our car sat on a sea of mirrors with mirrors above it showing the top and bottom of the car.

Ford clearly had the nicest display by far in the show and we clearly had the nicest spot in Ford’s display. He told us he had already taken a peek at the car and was amazed at how nice it was. Finally he looked at us and declared, “This is the nicest car in the entire show…as a matter of fact…this is the nicest car I have ever seen.” Whew! What a relief! We then worked with Ford to remove all of the plastic and clean up the area for the show to begin. We couldn't believe they gave us such a nice place in their booth. We were very fortuante Ford called.

I was amazed at all of the people who stopped by the booth. One man, from Japan, stopped by the booth and talked with Tomek, (our English challenged guy from Poland. I am sure communication was difficult at best). After he left, Tomek explained to me “some guy” wanted to know if a Honda 4 cylinder engine would fit in one of our cars?!?!? Puzzled, I wondered who would ask a question like that in the midst of such horsepower and testosterone excess? Tomek then handed me his business card…President, Honda Motor Cars.

Many other High Rollers were there as well. We had a good time and talked with many people and others in the industry. Many customers of ours came by to say hello. Factory Five was there with a very nice booth and Mark and Dave Smith were both there to talk to as well. Both of them are really nice. They even had their new super car there on display. What a nice car! I noticed the quality of their other cars is going up and up. They had some really nice cars there on display. Credit to them to keep working on their products to make them better and better all the time. Just makes the entire industry look better and better.

What a great show!

Well, now that we are finished with the car…what to do with it? We decided to place it on eBay. The link above is to the eBay sale. There are some really nice pictures of the car for those who are interested. If you look closely, you can see some of our latest parts made especially for this car.

Cross-drilled rotors
Billet aluminum gas tank straps
Billet aluminum front lower control arms
Billet aluminum rear lower control arms
Heim-jointed sway bar
Billet aluminum brake pedal
Billet aluminum clutch pedal
321 stainless steel roll bar
Aluminum jack hooks
Stainless steel prop rod
Hand-polished stainless steel frame
Kirkham nose and trunk emblem
Kirkham side emblem
Kirkham steering emblem
Polished stripe
Polished number “meatballs”

Thanks for being such a great Club. Sorry I haven’t been around lately, (I have been working on my masterpiece). Maybe I can get back to posting now that I am finished. I sure missed this place.

Have a Great Day and Happy Motoring!

David
:) :) :)