If you've ever played a board game, you know how much fun it is to move back a dozen spaces just because the little card from the stack in the middle of the board told you to! It's really not any fun at all at that point. Forward progress may be a redundant term, because backward progress usually puts you back a lot farther from where you started.
The concept is the same when you are building a car-nothing is more frustrating than disassembling something just because you forgot to add one small part. I remember a particular instance where, after reinstalling a rebuilt transmission and bolting up the driveshaft in my old Dodge truck, I noticed the sealed box next to the lift still contained the torque converter. Sometimes you can't win for trying.
But, in general, that's also been the case for the kit car industry. Every time the collective group of kit and replicar builders moves ahead when the latest chassis or body design debuts, you get some lump who still thinks it is 1974. Such is the case with a recent copy of Road & Track magazine. In their March 2006 issue there is a great road test article on a Superformance Coupe. Expertly photographed, the car (the very one owned by the Daytona's original designer, Peter Brock) looks like a million bucks racing through the countryside and is beautiful in static, low-light sunset shots.
The writing, comprehensive as any found elsewhere in the magazine and up to the usual high standards of R&T, goes on and on about how cool the car is and how much better it is than the original. That is until they write about the car's interior. Nary a mention in the first 10 paragraphs about it being a kit car, they then opine, "Anyone wondering about the Superformance's 'replicar' build quality need not worry. Besides the aforementioned body/chassis integrity, one look around the interior quickly squelches any concerns about it being a cobbled-together kit car."
Where has Road & Track been? From which of the past decades do they view the kit and replicar industry? Though it is true you will find varying degrees of quality in the market nowadays, the base level of quality is much higher today across the board than it was five years ago, let alone 10 or 20. The stigma of '70s-era kits (and some of their builders) still permeates the fabric of the industry today, but rarely would we compare '70s-era Fords or Hondas to their current-day counterparts, so why should they?
For all the progress we've made with kits and replicars, both in the build characteristics as well as the marketplace, why do we still have to travel back a dozen spaces after an article in an international magazine is published that helps keep that ancient thought alive?