What's your kit car owning history?

[renmure]

Inspired by Andy's idea of a snapshot census of everyone's kit car....

I was wondering what the kit car owning history of folk in the club was.

Given that I've no mechanical skills, no interest in car building and little enthusiasm for taking up a new hobby called "tinkering" you'd probably be surprised to hear that my STR, when it arrives, will actually be my 4th kit car.

First up, 16 years ago (wow, where did that time go!) came a 2004 Westfield MegaBlade. It was on display at a local supercar car meet, the owner had just completed it a few months earlier, it had 800 miles on the clock, he had spent nearly 2 years building it, it was getting a lot of attention because bike-engined cars were a bit of a fad back then, it looked ace and.. it was for sale!

Superbike engine, no windscreen, no heater, no radio, no reverse gear.. seemed like a sensible car to have in the garage I thought.

I thought that was really odd it was for sale tho because back then I didn't realise that for some folk the whole kit-car thing was all about building it rather than owning it but anyhow, I ended up driving home having agreed to buy it. That might have been the last time I was allowed to go to one of these meets on my own!

I owned it for 2 years, did about 4k miles in it. Didn't really like it because I quickly realised it was a bit too raw for me. It was great to take out for a blast at the weekend between breakfast and lunch but other than that the novelty soon wore off. It was very fast but kept bouncing off the 12,000rpm rev limiter before I could look at the speedo and in any event my eyes were half closed a lot of the time to stop them watering. I did a few trackdays in it and it was totally reliable although it was possible to be freezing cold from the knees up but with soles of your shoes melting.

I sold it to a guy from Cardiff. He drove the 480 miles to view it in a transit van towing a car trailer. He didn't really haggle much. I know he still has it as well.








To be continued....

Feel free to join in!!