Sad Story, Ok ending... DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST!

[Tom_Hughes]

If memory serves, this post was discussed here. Sort of a happy ending, at least it got to end of job. Great post to read. Almost as exciting as the missing Daytona Coupe-Phil Spector's (sp?) old car. Steve, I know your car was completed there. I recall delays, but because of transaxle mount problems from CAV, as it was an early ZF car. Not sure what your overall experience was. It's some 54 pages. I read them all; 2+ hours. Man, are there some emotional ups & downs. Guess I got lucky with my CAV! None of these issues for me. Just a good post to read & learn from if someone is going to build you something expensive. A house, a car, whatever. That 'hindshight' shit is always 20/20!

Ron, I hope I am not creating a mess with this post. If so, delete it & send everyone over to Club Cobra to read it. Seems like a GREAT bunch of guy's over there.

Enjoy, & be glad this is not you!

http://www.clubcobra.com/t59558.html

[Ron Earp]

Dang that is really long. Here is a summary from Pay Buckley. In the end the car was delivered, but I don't think it would have been without all the pressure from forum folks over there - forums are good for keeping some of the manufactuers in line.

---
Mike -

Reading every one of the posts on this would truly be a waste of time so I will attempt to do ask you asked....

A friend of Dwaynes (Hogdealer) appealed for assistance to some members of Club Cobra via email for help in getting his very sick friends CSX 4000 car done as, among other things, he was concerned that Dwayne might not live long enough to see his dream car completed.

The car was ordered 26 months ago from Roy Hunt at Finish Line in Las Vegas NV, a Shelby Dealer - Dwayne was lied to by them repeatedly regarding when it would be done.

Club Cobra members responded in a number of ways - some contacted Carroll Shelby and Brent Fenimore and got a commitment from them to put the screws to Roy Hunt at Finishline.

The car was finally promised on January 15th 2005 and was actually done on that date. Shelby Automobiles is dropping the car off at Dwaynes place of residence tomorrow.

I suspect that the only good that has come out of this whole saga is that perhaps it has opened some peoples eyes to the fact that they should not be blinded by promises and dreams...

[Mark Worthington]

Whenever a prospective buyer asks my opinion on the classic question, "Which GT40 should I buy?" I always respond that the single most important factor in evaluating kit car vendors is whether they have established a track record of actually delivering and standing behind their product.

Glad to hear thing worked out for this guy.

[Craig White]

Mark, certainly agree there...nothing beats a track record. Especially when you see how long these cars take to build.

And when you also start thinking about the years of improvements & refinements the major manufacturers have done to their products...wow. They also spend time improving quality workmanship, products, processes etc.

And the hours, effort and passion the principals of these companies put into their cars. They purely just do it for the love of it, compeitition does not drive them, they are driven solely by wanting to produce the best replica they can. I suppose pride has a lot to do with it as well. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

And they way they treat customers as friends. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I'll stop now. Anyway, a very interesting story, a lesson for everyone.

[Steve Toner]

I really don't know what the deal was with Dwayne's car - why it took them so long. There were many reasons that my car took so long. It was the first ZF car, and as delivered, the ZF would not fit properly. Plus there was the damage from when it came off the trailer, and the mods to fit the Aviaid oil pan. The shifter needed work (and ultimately resulted in waiting for a replacement tunnel from the factory), the coolant lines were reversed, the factory was balking at making good on warranty claims, ...

Add to this that the deal I had with FLMS basically put me at the bottom of their priority list - they were charging me at cost on parts and below their normal shop rates on labor, as this was the first CAV car they did and they wanted to gain some experience with it so they would have a better feel for what was involved in finishing them off (and thus would be able to give potential customers a better estimate of the ultimate cost of the car if they wanted FLMS to finish it for them).

Part of the issue is also that they are really a very small shop. They build Cobras from scratch (well frames come from Shelby, aluminum bodies from Kirkham, and Kroyer builds their engines). There are only a couple of guys who do the finish work on the cars, and their time is always in high demand...

The CAV turned out to require a lot more time to finish than most of us expected - it was advertised as "turnkey-minus" (and that's not to mention the ISO 9001 certification, which gave certain expectations of the expected quality of the roller) but really required a lot more effort than this implied. Roy told me that it was way more than they were expecting - they didn't want another Cobra-type effort. I do know of one other CAV buyer who actually yanked his car away from Finish Line and had someone else finish it because he got tired of waiting for them to get it done...

I did find that Finish Line could be persuaded to get things done more quickly if given a good reason. In my case, it was wanting to take the car to Monterey in 2003 and to Michigan (OK, maybe that one was a mistake [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] ) last summer.

So my take on this is that they just have more work to do than they can manage to get done, and so the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I really don't know what's up with the comments that they didn't have the money to pay Kroyer to release Dwayne's engine & such - Roy told me in that same time frame that business was good. In fact, one of the times I was down there they were interviewing people, looking to increase their staff.

[Keith Hardy]

This story almost beggars belief. Here we have a main dealer admitting he's using a customers deposit money finishing other cars(OK, so it goes in one big pot), whilst leaving his own (paid for $140,000 up front) untouched, lies about another car being his and generally fobbing the guy off for 2 freaking years! I think Finish Line got away lightly under the circumstances, but at least the guy got his car before tragedy struck. This is a strange story, and I can't think of many people who would put blind faith in the dealer for so long. Remember CS himself had to step in. How long would it have taken (if ever) if he hadn't? There is a lesson here for all buyers of specialist cars that require custom building/assembly needing to part with large sums of cash up front. Surely, a documented build with stage or interim payments to the value of project status would be more appropriate?

[Steve Toner]

[ QUOTE ]
Surely, a documented build with stage or interim payments to the value of project status would be more appropriate?

[/ QUOTE ]

And again, if I could give my experience with them, I actually had to ask them to send me bills for the work they had done so far, as I wanted to spread out the payments and not be surprised by a big bill at the end. The only time I was asked for any kind of prepayment was the initial deposit on my CAV.

I don't know why this Cobra buyer is reporting wildly different behavior from what I experienced.

Another data point: Roy told me he had a waiting list of people who wanted to buy GT40 replicas. He was not taking deposits from them until the new company (Autofutura) proved to him that they could deliver. That doesn't sound to me like Finish Line was having cash flow problems or "using a customers deposit money finishing other cars."

This is all very confusing to me.

[Keith Hardy]

I second that. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[Pete.]

It is confusing, but we have only heard one side of the story, and every story has at least two sides, sometimes more.
It would be interesting to hear from the other side.