Just Your Basic Black $40,000 Ferrari Slayer
Jalopnik made mention of this car last week; I’d never heard about it before, but… Wow!
It’s built by Factory Five Racing, a company better known for its Cobra replicas, but has extended its offerings to include this beauty. Unlike most supercars that are priced way, way out of the reach of mere mortals, the GTM is available only as a kit at a base price under $20,000. Of course, the kit is far from all-inclusive; you provide essentials like the engine, transmission, wheels & tires, etc… But the bodywork & interior is included, as is a well designed tube frame, suspension, steering… basically everything you need to build the car without having to fabricate anything.
I’ve had this idea in the back of my head that it’d be a fun exercise to take the mechanicals from an existing car — driveline, suspension & brakes, etc… — hang them on a frame designed and dimensioned around those parts, and end up with something like the Ariel Atom, but for a lot less money. Similar in concept to the LoCost 7, but doing it the hard way! But Factory Five went and did the hard work, and you’d only need a decent set of hand tools to do the job. A lot of money too, but at least you wouldn’t need your own machine shop.
In the end the cost will probably push the $40,000 envelope, but the resulting car is something pretty exclusive and pretty impressive, both in the looks department and in the performance department. It uses a lot of mechanicals from a 1997-2004 Corvette C5, and a transaxle from a 1987-1998 Porsche 911, hence the total cost estimate ending up around twice the kit cost.
That’s in today’s dollars. By the time I’d be able to get into one… Ugh. Don’t even want to think about it. But a guy can dream, right?
UPDATE: I first wrote this post back in November, 2007, and dredged it up from the past because I saw one in the flesh today, probably the same one Caleb & I saw a year ago. Very striking looking car. This one was black, and though I again only caught a few seconds’ glimpse as it turned a corner past me at an intersection, that was enough to recognize it and make me want it all over again. Now, how to come up with a spare $40k…