Quote:
Originally Posted by Borders Reivers
How many records have your name on them?
That's what I thought
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Records? What does that have to do with anything?
Are you alluding to Bonneville speed records? I don't compete there and Bob's records there have nothing to do with his P4 replica, anyway.
Have you driven one of his P4 replicas? I have.
Have you looked at one up close, after it has a few (say 1000) miles on it? I have.
The fact is, the examples I am familiar with are earlier versions of the car. He used different donor engines in the past (from basically whatever V12 model had little value as a used car at the time) and maybe a different gearbox (G50 911) and other components but my comments are still probably relevant.
In those days, he was willing to send out to a customer a car that was poorly built, that had problems that should have been sorted out prior to delivery and the cars suffered from numerous quality issues. I had conversations with Bob about how the cars were built, who fabricated the bodies for him, etc. and it all sounds good but the stuff doesn't last. The bodies quickly developed all sorts of stress cracks, the various components he sourced to assemble the things (911 gearbox, Corvette pedal cluster, etc.) didn't play well together.
If you look at some of the build shots of the current cars, you'll see cheap hardware and some less-than-ideal design details, so I'm not going to bet my money that things have changed for the better.
I've been around a long time, seen original P3, 412P and P4 cars driven in anger and I can tell you they'd run rings around one of his replicas. Ferrari, for all their many faults, knew how to build a car that worked and that's not what I experienced when I drove Bob's version.
JR