[Mister Towed]

Sorry to hear of your sad loss Paul, there's not much else I can say to console you.

As for the business practices of all those concerned with the Sammio/Ribble/Miglia cars, all I can say is that I met with Gary, Mike (Miglia) and the two Andys several times, and I don't believe that any of them deliberately ripped off or let down customers.

With Gary and Mike my view is that both had more raw design talent and practical ability to turn their vision into an actual product than business acumen. In Gary's case the project (unexpectedly?) just ran away and got too big for him to manage and his enthusiasm burned out, hence the sale to the Andys.

I don't think Mike's heart was really in his project, I get the feeling it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Andys had great ambition and enthusiasm for the product but didn't have the time, skills or business ability to improve the product to the standard they wanted and market it to new customers before it soaked up too much money to make the company viable.

I do hope someone takes over the Spyder project and gets it back into production as there wasn't much wrong with the original concept and car in the first place imho, which was cheap, simple fun.

Oh, and it'd be a shame if El Primer stopped contributing to the forum, I'm aware that he was quite close to the origins of the project and built at least one Spyder to a really good standard, so is able to make valuable contributions to the discussions on here with a fair bit of insider information.

Anyway, the sun is shining and I've got the day off, so I'm going out for a blast in the 1950's silver race car I never would've owned if it wasn't for the Sammio motor company.