To me it appears that two different approaches to the kit car market have been taken by Tribute and DNA.
At the beginning of kit-car history, the rebody special was a way for motorsport enthusiasts with limited budgets but strong mechanical engineering skills to take a cheap old mainstream car and turn it into the car of their dreams. The fibreglass bodies were basic but very cheap and a great deal of skill and effort was necessary to get the finished car built to a high standard.
That concept pretty much disappeared by the mid to late sixties, with the notable exceptions of the beach buggy and mini moke. In the early eighties there was a bit of a revival, but the industry had changed, with kit manufacturers focussing more on high quality mouldings that needed less preparation before paint, bespoke chassis and drivetrain packages and tailored interior packages. This meant that there were lots of high quality Cobra/Daytona/356 Speedster replicas available, but the kit prices either went through the roof or the manufacturer went bust as they made no money.
There were a couple of manufacturers who tried to buck that trend in the 90's and provide budget kits that needed more skill to finish- Pilgrim with their Sumo springs to mind - but an awful lot of attendees at kit car shows had no mechanical skills but relatively deep pockets so the high end kit producers ticked over while the little guys went under.
Then in about 2010, along came Gary Janes. Creator of the Sammio Spyder Herald/Vitesse based 50's style special. All hail the saviour of the budget kit car movement! The Sammio was incredibly cheap, it was quite possible to put a car on the road to a really good standard for under £3k, and looked like a multi million dollar car once finished, but required a lot of skill and vision to get it to that standard due to the very basic nature of the mouldings. Now, I'm not sure of the details, but I believe Chris from Tribute worked quite close to Gary J's workshop, in fact they might even have worked together on one or two projects (that's a guess), and Tribute either took inspiration from Gary J or vice-versa, but it's that end of the market that they now serve - very well priced body conversions that need some skill to complete to a good standard but leave the builder free to personalise their car to a greater extent than the kits at the more expensive end of the market.
So, fast forward to the end of 2015 and you can, with vision, time and effort, build yourself a stunning roadworthy Tribute 250GT or Spyder for about the same price as you pay for the bodyshell alone from DNA. I've no doubt that the DNA bodyshell is likely to be the higher quality moulding and would require less work to get to a good standard, so it really depends how deep your pockets are and how confident you are that you can fit, prep and paint the Tribute panels to your Z3 donor.
You pays your money, you takes your choice...
|