Please bear with me while I construct this site. It's hard enough building the car let alone trying to build a web site and maintaining it!!
Build Diary
August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005
Why an Ultima CanAm.
Ever since the Beach Buggy hit our shores I have had a desire to build a car, but when you're young (at that time) there always seemed to be other priorities coming along, girlfriends, wife, mortgage, kids, any thoughts of car build put on the back burner until time and money allowed.
Well time and money has finally arrived..................
I am now in a position to consider building my first car. Now, what should I go for? Well commonsense says go for a simple one and work your way up from there, but commonsense never played a part in my life!!! So I started looking at my two favourite cars, a Cobra and a GT40.
I started to research the companies manufacturing Cobra's and soon found some strong debates over the choice of engines, should it be a Ford or a Chevy? Then the debate on styles, an almost exact replica or a replica with better styling. What running gear to use, Jaguar or a newly developed chassis? I think that the choice I was looking at would have taken me more time to choose than to build!!!
I was also researching the GT40 companies, a lot less choice but it seemed more technical experience was needed, and then Ford announced that they were building the new Ford GT I was wondering what to do, so I thought that I would visit the Donnington show in 2003 that was coming up. I started again to look around at the Cobra's and spoke to some people on how they built their cars and what they thought was a good buy, and not surprisingly it was their car that was the best deal. It was while I was looking for the track that I passed through the Ultima marquee, (WOW!!) I think that covers it!! I took one look at the GTR and was hooked. I sat in a GTR and got as much information there and then, they couldn't be more helpful.
When I got home I started to look at the Ultima website and found links to customer build sites and the PistonHeads forum. I could now follow the build of three GTR's. (CJ's, BobM, James Crewe.) The more I read about the Ultima the more I became interested in building one (always a good sign!) The fact that it was not a replica also helped me in my decision making and that the options were limited to, one style be it a GTR or A CanAm and one engine choice (unless you start engineering your own engine install) a Chevy, a big Chevy and you can't beat the sound of a big V8.