[Mister Towed]

When I got interested in kit cars and specials back in the early eighties, kit car magazines and shows were really the only way to get information about the cars that were available for the home builder.

As such, the typical route into ownership was to see an article or ad in a magazine about a car that you found interesting, then check in a future mag if the company had a stand at a forthcoming kit car show before attending the show and hoping they hadn't gone bust in the meantime.

In my case, after reading about the Covin 356 Speedster I attended the Newark show, saw the demonstrator - a beautiful dark grey example with oxblood leather interior, spoke to the designer and fell in love with the car. I went home, started saving my pennies, bought a Type 3 VW Variant (WEL 9J where are you now?) as a donor and started stripping it down.

About six months later I'd saved enough to buy the body and spaceframe chassis - the Covin Speedster didn't use a cut down Beetle chassis - but by then, Covin were no more, having gone under or just wound up the business, I'm really not sure which.

So, the Variant got rebuilt and sold on and my self-build car fund got gambled away by my then partner while I was overseas on operations, which also led to us losing our house, divorce (cost me £99 as we had negative assets by then), marry somebody new, buy and renovate a cottage, change of career, have a family, etc., etc. and the whole self-build project got put on the back burner for about thirty years.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century and the route into kit car ownership is very different: The internet means that all the information you want about self-build cars is only a mouse click away. Emails or social media sites make communicating with the kit car companies easy and quick, while increasing prosperity - for those who choose to work for a living, anyway (please take note, Jeremy Corbyn) and cheap credit mean that everyone has access to masses of information 24-7, and even those enthusiasts who can't really afford to build a kit car can afford to build a kit car.

In my case, I was idly googling the word 'Spyder' on my netbook when an ebay listing for the Sammio Spyder popped up in my search engine with a hyperlink to the car's website (try saying that lot in 1982, McFly).

Once I'd read about the concept and seen some pictures on Gary J's website I was hooked and just knew I'd be building one.

Today, as in right now today, that would have been enough information.
I'd have contacted the company by email and/or phone, visited their premises to take a look around and placed an order, paying in full there and then with my credit card as an insurance policy against them going bust.

As it was way back in 2011 (ahh, nostalgia for the olden days when we still had polar icecaps, eh?), I was actually then still able to read about the car in a kit car magazine and view the demonstrator at a kit car show, but my point is, that's no longer essential.

The shows used to be an invaluable source of hard to find spare parts too, but guess what - the internet has a raft of sell-your-unwanted-crap sites that are a goldmine for those parts, and just about every scrapyard in the country also has its own website, or at least lists their phone number on t'internet somewhere.

So that's my view - just as the market for classic replicas seems to be booming, mostly down to how valuable and rare the real things have become (perhaps that's another discussion looming...), kit car sales appear to be on the up while kit car shows have dwindled away to pretty much nothing, a casualty of the age of information technology.

Thoughts anyone?