Picture Perfect

Perhaps some are not familiar with the snowball effect, especially when it comes to building a car from kit form. It happens when you get a specific car in mind, set aside a budget to build it and, when things start to get rolling along, the project snowballs into something you (and sometimes your spouse) just aren't prepared for.

Various "trader" magazines and kit car Web sites are littered with semi-completed home builds for sale where the owner somehow let the project get out of hand. No longer able to finish the car for anywhere near the cost they originally thought, they blow the car out of their garage for pennies on the dollar. Others who manage to hang on somehow (straddling that thin line between pride and stupidity) end up finishing their car, but not the way they wanted to. Then there are the folks who go after a project, realize it's turning out better than they hoped for, and can visualize the light at the end of the tunnel before actually seeing it. By hanging in there and sticking it out, they end up with a stunning vehicle and an intense pride of ownership-folks like Roland Eddy from San Diego.

Some may say that Roland, a restaurateur by trade, started slowly with his project, but once it was going, it was full steam ahead. The story on Eddy's Daytona starts back in 1984, when he first began thinking that he'd like to build a Daytona clone. But there were only a couple of manufacturers doing them at the time, and the circumstances to obtain one were never quite right.

In the late-'90s, Roland got a call from Carl Wade, a friend/builder about an Upstate Super Replicars Daytona coupe. It was ordered by a customer who then changed his mind, so the deal fell through. It was a roller with no motor, bodywork, paint, interior, or engine work done, and it was even on a junk set wheels and tires used just to roll it around. The timing was right, so Roland bought the project with the intent of finishing it.

Eddy wanted to be totally involved in the build up of the car rather than just cutting a check for a finished car. But with nowhere to build it, the car sat in the back of a shop in Arizona for a year while Roland sorted out where and how it would be built.

The how was an easy decision because he'd picked up a 1:18-scale Exoto model-the white #56 "French" coupe. It featured twin Guardsman Blue stripes over a Wimbledon White paint job, and a big #5 on the nose, ducktail, and meatballs on the door.

The where was a little trickier-until he got the opportunity to obtain a 2,000-square-foot shop with some extra space out back where a car could go together. Roland wasn't idle during this time, as he'd recently completed a build up of a GT-40 from GTDevelopment in England (which he still campaigns at open tracks throughout California). During that car's "freshening," Roland met up with a talented car builder, Joe LaPorte.

Joe, an East Coast transplant to SoCal, knew his way around brakes, shears, and all the tools needed to fabricate anything out of sheetmetal or aluminum. Joe had done some of the work on Roland's GTD-40 (such as expanding the aluminum gas tanks and upgrading the brakes), and Eddy was impressed with his work. Eddy explained his coupe project to LaPorte, who checked out the car for himself, deciding then to work with Roland on the build (which allowed Joe the time to also work on his own projects, too).

The pair struck a deal and in January, 2001, LaPorte and Eddy started on the chassis, working up from there. Though an independent suspension was in place up front and in the rear, they decided to go with an IRS/IFS combo from Accurate Machine Products. AMP's George Petrus assembled a twin A-arm system for the front (using Wilwood 12-inch disc brakes and twin-piston calipers) and an Indy rear with outboard discs (with Wilwood 11-inch rotors with two-piston calipers).

Brake control would be the job of a Tilton dual-master cylinder and pedal assembly, and PS Engineering supplied the pin drive, 15-inch rollers (7.5 fronts, 9.5s in the rear) that were shod with Goodyear Eagle Sport Special bias-ply rubber, 26.5x10.50-15s in the rear and 26.5x8.00-15s up front. The car comes from Upstate with a six-point rollcage, but Joe added more tubing to create a 12-point system with diagonal bracing running through the door openings and a hoop around the windshield/dash area. A dummy plastic engine block (backed to Ford T56 transmission) was used during the build up to locate the drivetrain during assembly.

Eddy isn't the type to install a stock motor in anything, and with his penchant for racing, decided to go all-out with the engine in his Daytona. Assembled by Greg Grosset at Total Performance (Santee, CA), the 302R block Ford was stroked to 331 cubes using a 3.250-inch Eagle 4340 forged crank. Eagle H-beam rods (5.400-inch) and SRP flat-top pistons (set-up at 10.2:1) were also used, as were a set of Gurney-Eagle aluminum heads (with T&D full roller-rocker valvetrain, Ferrea valves, and a Crane hydraulic roller cam), and a throttle-body induction system created by Injection Perfection (controlled by an ACCEL Gen VIII spark and fuel management system).

A MSD ignition system and distributor was installed, as were custom headers from Mark Morton, which flow through twin glasspack mufflers (two per side). A Pro 5.0 shifter helps select the gears in the T56 trans, while a McLeod aluminum flywheel and double-disc hydraulic clutch system makes shifting a snap.

While the engine was going together, Joe attended to fabricating and installing the aluminum panels that would make up the bulk of the car's interior. Special attention was made to the car's details, such as using buttonhead screws and Nutserts instead of rivets, which would allow easy removal if there were a need for repairs in the future. LaPorte also redesigned and fabricated a new window frame for the rear hatch, and then built a buck for the Plexiglas rear window, which was formed at Archer Plastics in San Diego.

Using screws instead of rivets also helped in the disassembly of the car for the necessary bodywork before painting. Pasi's Place (San Marcos, CA) got the call to do the work, which was carried out flawlessly before the PPG Deltron Wimbledon White base and Guardsman Blue racing stripes went on. The appropriate stickers were located and applied, all except for the "Gurney for President" sticker, which Roland has but hasn't added to the rear hips as of yet.

Eddy and LaPorte attacked the reassembly of the coupe with their usual high level of attention to detail. Inside the cockpit, toggle switches and Stewart-Warner gauges were added to the dash, and a Moto-Lita steering wheel was fitted with a custom quick disconnect set-up from LaPorte.

Being more of a track car than one for the street, leather-lined aluminum bucket seats were installed, as were a set of Simpson five-point racing harness belts. North County Upholstery (San Marcos, CA) added what little leather there is to the seats because the rest of the interior is a combination of flat-black anodized and cleared aluminum panels.

The car was finished in March of 2004, and it debuted at the Fabulous Fords car show at Knott's Berry Farm in Southern California the next month. A few weeks later, the Daytona made an appearance at the AHA's Fun in the Sun show at Knott's, where it won KIT CAR's Editor's Choice award for its flawless workmanship.

Recently, the car to was taken to Mark MacNeal at The Dyno Shop (Santee, CA), so the final tuning and adjustments could be made to the motor. Weighing in at about 2,800 pounds (wet, with driver), the coupe delivered a front/rear weight bias at 46/54 percent (with driver). On the dyno, the Daytona was able to produce 444.7 horsepower at the rear wheels at 5,600 rpm with a peak torque rating of 420 lb-ft at 4,700-4,900 rpm.

When you build a car this nice, sometimes you run into the danger of building it too nice. Just like a piece of rolling art, you may not want to abuse it after putting so much time, money, and effort into it. After all, who would want to abuse a work of art? For now, Roland wants to show the car, but he and Joe know it will probably eventually end up on the track with Roland shoving it into the corners at speed. He'd like to take the car to Nevada's Silver State run (the high-speed timed race on Nevada's desert highways) because, he says, the car drives like a race car. And that makes sense-why would you ever want to drive this car slow?