Maybe in life and in everything else, but not when you’re talking about building your own car. This is serious business for serious people. There are no easy to build kits out there. The ones that claim it’s easy are trying to sell you. Remember that. You are building your own car for Pete’s sake, it’s not like putting together a bicycle from Sears (as much as we’ve tried to make this so!).
Back in 1998, we sent out a customer survey to our first 500 roadster customers. The survey reported that it took our customers an average of 253 hours to build the roadster kit (that includes everything like bodywork and disassembly of a donor car). As of 2007 we had built and shipped more than 6,000 roadster kits! The kits we are building today have benefited from hundreds of refinements and upgrades, so these older survey numbers are now, most definitely, on the long side.
Today the average customer spends fewer hours and more dollars. Average customers spend between $22K and $24K dollars building their base Mk3 roadsters and it takes the average Joe less than 200 hours. A few things have changed over the years… mostly the advent of the internet. Today there is a huge on-line community there to help guys with their builds, suggest tips, and swap ideas. The impact of the massive FFR owner’s group and FFCobra forum cannot be understated. All you have to do is log on and start asking any question under the sun.
Some companies tell people they can build their car in 40 hours or some stupid thing like that. Yes, for us in the shop we can put a 50-50 race car together in no time flat, but we’ve done it before lots of times before (FYI: 50-50 means that it looks good from 50 feet as it is traveling 50 mph). The Factory Five Racing kit is simple to build, but you have to budget some time. Our kits, are not for everyone. They are made for the guy at home who has worked on or restored his own car. The kits are designed to be assembled by someone at home with ordinary tools and a working knowledge of cars and their components. There is no welding or fabrication.
Factory Five owners themselves have proven the engineering and build-ability of the cars best. At numerous locations FFROGS have come together to build a customer car in a single day or weekend. The first group to do this was the Southern California FFROGS who did this on a bright sunny spring day in Mission Viejo California back in 1998. There were some magazine articles that documented the event. One was entitled “It Takes a Village”, and the other was “Instant Cobra”.
If you have doubts about whether you have the skills to do this you have some great options. Ask a customer on-line, enroll in our three-day build school, visit our facility and speak to an engineer and check out the parts up close… At the end of the day, while you have to build this car yourself, you have a lot of the very best people in your corner.