Response from marlin sports cars

[5EXi girl]

I often check the Marlin forums at madaboutkitcars and am normally very pleased to see that it is mainly growing to be a very good site run by some very dedicated 5EXi / Sportster builders. If however, anyone has any cause for complaint I would encourage them to contact me personally so that these can be dealt with promptly and efficiently. Recently a few negative comments have been put on the site which have not given a true reflection of Marlin Cars and I answer these topics below: -

a) So 'What would you do different'?

Marlin have never expected people to buy all their parts from us, only the parts that we make which are specific to the car and can not be sourced elsewhere. We acknowledge that by spending time and effort shopping around and you can possibly find a cheaper price from a breakers or online. Buying the parts from Marlin however guarantees that you are then using the correct parts for your car and saves you the time and effort of purchasing from multiple sources.

We would also like to reply to the following remarks regarding the racing
side of the business.

"If Marlin can fit a complete new back-end onto marks race car and swap
everything over and have it running 4-5 weeks later, why cant they produce
the kits quicker?"
"Perhaps that's rhetorical - the race car is prioritised, at the expense of
kits?"

During the course of the race season our sponsors, our race customers and their sponsors expect that the Marlin race cars will be competing at every race meeting of the season. The 5EXi is competing against the likes of Ferrari, Mazda, Caterham etc in the highly competitive Castle Combe Special GT Championship. This provides us with one of the best opportunities to further enhance the performance and handling of the car quickly and safely, the benefits of this are incorporated into the kits we produce and to any existing owner wishing to take advantage of the latest developments.

b) Rubbing down gel coat

We accept that there were some occasions when a small number of bodies were highlighted as having less then perfect gel coats. This led us to searching for and appointing a new supplier. The new supplier has agreed that they will be much more accommodating should any problems arise in future. These bodies are made as light as is practically possible without the use of more expensive raw materials such as woven mat, carbon fibre, diolin or other more exotic materials. This ensures that our customers receive maximum value for money and will be able to afford the repairs if any accidental damage occurs! As we have previously stated we particularly make a racing car body as light as possible which probably weighs less than half that of the production car bodies. This helps to ensure that the race car bodies are as light as possible, all of which aids competitive performance.

c) What's Happening?

I think this was well covered in our reply to Charles.

We are actively engaged in building our new, bigger and improved manufacturing site to satisfy the demand for orders that have been placed to produce cars before the end of this year. Kits, racing and building cars will remain a vitally important part of Marlin's expanding business activities.

During the office move last year we experienced a lot of problems with our phone lines and broadband because BT had to apply for planning permission to dig up the road and put the new lines in, all of this took far longer than anticipated. We did everything we could to speed up the process but at the end of the day we were in the hands of other organisations. As a direct result of this, it understandably caused some customers considerable frustration due to the lack of response from us. We can only apologise for any inconvenience caused but this only happened for the reasons explained above and is not representative of the normal service we provide. We are pleased to report that all of these issues have now been resolved. In order to prevent anything like this happening in future we are currently setting up a separate dedicated email address support@marlinsportscars.co.uk - any emails sent to this address will be dealt with within 24 hours and a receipt confirmation will be sent to you immediately. Please note that this address is to only be used when you need specific technical advice or have a query or comment that can not be dealt with by either the dedicated technical help line number 07748 235630, the office no. 01363 773772 or by emailing Terry on terry@marlinsportscars.co.uk.

If we get asked questions via this email address we will be happy to answer
them in a way that could then be published on line to help others and may
well also use on our FAQ pages on web site.

This will then be superseded by a dedicated forum, which is currently being worked on and we plan to have this live by Spring 2008. We welcome any comments about this and suggestions of categories you would like to see up there. If any of you budding builders would like to be in at the beginning of this do please let me know.


Kind Regards
Terry & Mark

I have also copied the same replies to the 3 topics so they can not be missed.