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 /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif ) 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.