[hp2]

The biggest difference....a professional driver. That isn't to say there hasn't be a bunch of research done to create a good package of geometric design for the Factory 5 and Ridetech cars, but if you noticed the in car videos, the driver had to really man handle the kit cars to get those lap times out of them. The flip side to the Lambo was that the in car camera showed that the driver made wheeling it around the course look like a cake walk. Does the '33 handle better than all of my cars, probably. But it has had a lot more work and attention given to it than all my cars combined. It should be fast.

Another factor in all of this, the Lambo has to meet current Federal crash test mandates, so it is saddled with a lot of safety gear that the kit cars do not have to meet because of their perceived/registration age. This means the kit cars cars can be built extremely light, I don't think any of them were over 3000 pounds, so they all have very favorable power to weight ratios that allow them to close up a lot of the performance gap against the Italian's power and design.

As to why Hotchkis or XV are so much more expensive...I'm assuming based on your prior Mopar experince, its simple economics. XV concentrates solely on mopars, and if you are buying Gen 1 Camaro parts, Hotchkis is not nearly as expensive as they are for any their Mopar parts. Remember, one year of Camaro production is equal to all 5 years of Challenger and Cuda production combined. Then you take the mopar segment and figure 50% of that is stock restoration, 45% of that is drag racing, then only 5% of all those would even consider handling upgrades. That boils down to probably a 10:1 ratio of parts that can be sold for a Camaro vs a Mopar. Your Mustang is actually going to come in somewhat in the middle of those as there are more handling Mustangs than Mopars, but not nearly as many as there are Camaros. When you have to amortize your production costs over ten times fewer units, your per unit cost has to go up for you to break even. For Hotchkis, they are replacing a number of the factory parts with some re-engineered components. XV, well hell, they redesigned the whole damn thing and there is not a stock Mopar part left the system anywhere. That is a HUGE engineering expense.

Now Ridetech prices, they actually are very comparable from make to make and looking at the Level 2 systems, Mustang, Camaro, and Mopar are all actually within $900 of each other with the Chevy being most expensive, but it probably needed the most redesign effortof teh three. Stock 1st Gen Camaro geometry sucks, bad. I notice there is no level 3 system for a mopar. I'd allude this narrowing of the price gap by their ability to keep the key, expensive parts of the system more universal in nature and therefore spread the cost across a greater range of products. By doing this, you only need to make the model specific brackets for each kit. BTW, the front of mopar systems only adds the shockwave shock and tubular uper arms. It still uses the torsion bar set up so you are actually buying a pair of $900 shocks for the front end in the mopar kit. Compared to everyone else you mentioned, that means Ridetech's Mopar kit is actually one the most expensive kits for the engineering received.

That isn't to say that Ridetech parts aren't good. They are. Very good in fact. They certainly are one of the more engaged manufacturers with making classics drive well, and for that I applaud their efforts, even though I will probably not ever use their products. But I tend to havedifferent requirements than most others on here.

All IMO, which with a $1.95, will get you a cup of coffee at Dunkin.