Anyone have more info on this car? What blower set up is that? Seats?

 

That's Merlin's car. Got quite a history. The blowers are Whipple. He sunk a ton of $$ into that car. He hasn't been around in a long time.

Here we go again.

 

Here go read all you want.
http://forums.corvetteforum.com/showthread.
Thats the original builder of Merlin, and while he was a hero in my book lots of others went bonkers about it...

To bad his build site isn't up anymore...

 

That's the most recent one I found too. I like the discussion about private & public forum.

 

In before the haters

I'm affraid you just opened a big ole can of worms with this one

 

I"m picturing that car without the rear spoiler, ground effects, 80's front end, normal hood, and any other speed shop add-ons I can't see. Wow, what a pretty car it would/could be.

 

I like the ground effects...I don't care for the fender gills however.

 

its also a feature car at lateral-g.net

 

i seriously doubt that car has ever seen .5 g much less been driven over 30 MPH.

Show and shine

 

Not my cup-of-tea, but it looks like he did a nice job on it.

 

'He' of course meaning the guy Steve Hired!

 

I wondered what happened to that Merlin dude. Its a wicked vetterod. I love 'em.

 

Steven Kamis?? He sold it to someone else (he put it on lateral-g.net), who then sold it at barrett jackson. I think steven is now playing with mercs or ferraris or whatever..but who cares, before you know it he'll be back flaunting his stuff and a big pissing match will erupt.

 

go here:

http://www.lateral-g.org/distad/

 

Nice car, seems to be excellent workmanship. I'm not a big fan of the blower sticking up through the hood (although I like that hood), the fender gills, or the '80s front end (if I had an '80-'82, I'd be swapping back to an earlier version), but the overall effect is pretty wicked.

 

I was not here when that was being built; however, I can sense the friction everytime a "Merlin" post comes up. The workmanship looks great. Doesn't matter to me if Steve did it or someone did the work. I wish one of the owners would have taken it to a track to see what it could do.

 

I followed the Merlin buildup and got a few good ideas from it. I wish he had tracked the car to see what it would do. I suspect it would have been to much and very hard to keep on the track. With my experience at 500 RWHP it's a handful. I can't imagine twice that. Talk about throttle control. Holy crap.
Anyway it was a fun build-up.
Now if TT could just get finished so we can see what his will do!! LOL
I get the impression he will run his car.
Later!

 

After Steve had it all finished he realized he didn't like, he is a very big guy and didn't fit inside. His goal was to have a C3, which he thinks are the most beautiful cars in the world, that could blow the doors off any Exotic sports car he encountered.

In the time that it was being built he owned some really nice cars, I think after having those cars he realised that bolting a bunch of parts onto a C3 won't make it as nice as those. It may have some grat power and pull a lot of Gs on a skid pad, but it didn't have the feel of a modern car.

I think he had about $170,000 into it. I forgot what he sold it for but the interesting thing is that if he had instead invested that same money into stock market he would have lost even more... so it wasn't a bad investment overall.

There are a number of people on the forum that hated him. 9 out of 10 threads where his name is mentioned get locked.

I personally admire him for atempting to build his dream car his way. He didn't have the time and maybe not the skill to do the labor himself, but it was his vision. He was also very generous. There was a forum member who had very little money and their tranmission carpped out. The guy couldn't afford to fix it anytime soon. Steve offerted to help get it running again. I email Steve and asked about that, and his answer was that he like to see C3s on the road and wanted to help a fellow forum member.

His webpage which is no longer up was loaded with picture and details of the build. The work done was outstanding.

One thing that set some people against him was that he ignored some very good advice. He was very stubborn about building his way. The concensus here was that the drivetrain was way too weak for the monster motor. And the motor took a lot of tuning to get it to work. I think he sold the car before it was ever properly tuned.

The second owner came to the forum for a short time and insisted that the car ran very well. But because of the hatred of that car on this forum he was quickly made to feel very unwelcome here.

Steve was accused by many people of flaunting his wealth. I didn't really see that. It's all relative. Some people here have 4 concourse quality Vettes in their signiture and they never get accused of flaunting their wealth, then there's the whole C6 and in particular the C6 Z06 section of the forum, those are some very wealthy people who have al sorts of cool and expensive toys. Nobody ever complains about them.

I bet this thread will be locked by this time tomorrow.

~Jay

 

Yea - I saw the car at Barrat-Jackson's Scottsdale auction last month.

 

This is the first I've seen/heard about this car. Sounds like what I'm about to say has been said and argued about a thousand times already....

Get rid of the spoiler on the back and modify the front so it doesn't look like an '80-'82 with some ground effects bolted to the bottom and it would look much better. Everything else is design sytling which people may or may not like, but those two things look out of place.