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65 Roadster Mark 3 / Type 65 Coupe / Challenge Series Racer/ GTM Supercar/Spyder GT |
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| Building It | |
There are no easy to build kits out there. The ones that claim they're easy are trying to sell you something. Remember that. You are building your own car for Pete’s sake, it’s not like putting together a bicycle from Sears. Some companies tell people that their car can be built in 40 hours or some stupid thing like that. Yes, for us in the shop we can put a car together in no time flat, but we’ve done it before lots of times. The Factory Five Racing kit is simple to build, but you have to budget some time for it. This kit, like every single kit out there is not for everyone,. it’s made for the guy at home who has worked on or restored his own car. The buyer of this kit is a lot like the television character portrayed by comedian Tim Allen on ABC’s show "Home Improvement". There’s some Tim Taylor in us all…"more power, ugh, ugh ugh"… The FFR roadster kit was 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. One of the nice things is that with a single donor vehicle, you can greatly reduce the time it takes running around getting parts from lots of different cars. Back in 1998, after we had shipped over 500 of our roadster kits, we sent out a survey to our first 500 customers requesting details pertaining to the time, cost and effort it took them to complete their cars. At that time our survey results indicated that it took an average of 253 hrs to build the roadster kit (including everything from disassembly of the donor car to final paintwork). Additionally, the average cost to build an FFR roadster was $17,800. The average price paid for donor cars/parts was $2,300. At this point, June 2002, we have built and shipped more than 2500 FFR roadster kits! The latest version kits have benefited from hundreds of refinements and upgrades, so these older survey numbers are now, most definitely, on the long side. You can check out the owners gallery for more information on individual costs and time to build from the latest survey, Spring 2002. The Factory Five Owners Groups themselves have best proven the engineering and buildability of the cars. At numerous locations FFROGs have come together to build a customer’s car in a single day or a weekend. The first group to prove the one day build concept was the Southern California FFROGs, who achieved this on one bright sunny spring day in 1998 in Mission Viejo, California. Defintely a news worthy event, there were several magazine that documented the build in text and photos. Another "FFROG Build-up" was hosted by FFR customer Richard Oben from Kansas City, Missouri. In 1999, Richard gathered local FFROGs together at a customer’s garage for a one-day build festival. The car that was produced out of the 24 hour flurry of men and tools soon afterward became the first FFR roadster to break the 10 second barrier in the quarter mile with a 9.96 sec pass at 146 mph in April of 2000! More Information
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