I doubt the steel is smelted for my frame it’s so far in the future so in a queue for something- I don’t mind what - if economics was the deciding factor I dare say we’d all have a supercharged S2 Elise - having had a caterham I quite like a space frame - it’s labour intensive but very rigid. Obviously for originality I gather a steel tub is grand. Obviously in the numbers hawk will produce in and the methods the cost is probably reversed so do I understand and can well believe the steel tub is dearer.
Thanks - I’m an Alfa enthusiast and currently have among other things a hill climbing Alfasud sprint (with an air leak in the fuel pick up behind the facet somewhere) which I need to fix.
Anyway yes Busso. It’s very early days and I know from the AROC how things are. The other question is who builds the motor up - in the Alfa community it sometimes feels like you have to be invited to have your engine worked on which is why I have a ‘Sud. The best Alfa engineer i met doesn’t even advertise any more and just looks after a handful of special customers.
Who built your motor?
Is that just the chassis or the whole car. I can well believe a Dino motor will be approaching 80 -100k when fit. If a two bed flat by the sea in Cornwall is 500k/700k, £200k when you can have so much pride in and fun with it feels like a bargain. Mind you you can have a lot of pride and fun with a Capri (30k), original XR2 (20k) or a Caterham (35k) which will set you hair on fire.
I once read about a bloke who spent years building up a R4 alpine - scoured Europe for years for the bits - amazing thing - cost low, highest effort and wow factor.
Last edited by AndrewF; 21-02-2022 at 20:43.
£200k!!! Golly, you could almost get a proper LB for that if you cut back a bit and decided not to go for some of the carbon parts.
Genuine point swirling in my head tho. Surely the kits available now effectively allow people to build/own/order cars that are better than the originals so it seems like a case of reverse-engineering gone array to develop something less good than you can currently have, just because you can, when at the end of the day it will never be any more original than anything else that isn't, err, original.
Takes all sorts tho and I'm all for folk with more money than sense spreading it about a bit.
The £200k price Gerry quoted was an estimate of a completed car. Not just the steel tub. No matter what he does it'll always be possible to tell them from an original. Unless you use a Stratos as a donor car. Now don't laugh at that. If you go to Goodwood or Silverstone and watch the Cobras racing just how many of those do you think are the genuine article and how many are ally bodied replicas. A LOT more than you might think, wreck an original and it's a serious wallet dent but a replica. Well, still expensive but not to the same extent. So, there are people out there rallying their Stratos and a replacement steel tub makes a lot of sense...
And yes, I actually considered selling my car a couple of years ago as it would have funded a steel tub and Dino drivetrain. The sale of the second car, once completed, would have financed the remainder. But it's not going to happen.I'm going to need the cash from the second one for a house move....
Guy
You could say the same for the Lynx D type, a Montreal on carbs ( the non burning sort of Montreal) the Eagle e type. I saw a man with an F40 bring his car to a show, unload it, start it, load it up and that was it. Maybe just owning it made him happy. But I want to tinker and drive a car I have and you guys can do that with yours and you built em and you can fix em whether you spent 20k or 200k on it.
Jim, yes, you can have something now that's effectively a "modern, upgraded" Stratos, while staying true to the spirit of the original. And that's the reason that LB had to close the order book (for now) - rather a lot of people think the same way! I'm in that camp - I love the whole restomod idea. But, there are others for whom their Strat has to be as close to an original car as possible. Up till now that's still been a fair way short, but with Gerry's steel car you could actually build an exact copy. And in some ways, 200k is a bit of a bargain when you see the price of originals - you've got a brand new car for less than half price of a 50-year-old one. You couldn't call it a Lancia, although I bet almost all of them will end up with Lancia badging, but it's still a brand new old car, a bit like all these continuations that Jaguar and Aston are turning out.
All that matters really is that you build the car you want, and sod everyone else
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