It's not at all about the money (I *do* own a Ferrari ) - it's about "the process" of being able to do as much "in house" as possible. I also have a pretty good machine shop in my garage and... let's just say I've "honed my skills" over the years in this specific area. Kevin
We're aware that you're friendly with Dan, @Fred Daniali. I can understand where you're coming from and that you want to defend your friend, but you're not exactly a neutral party here. It's abundantly clear that no one's hands are clean in this mess.
Here a EAG swapped 599 for reference. Car drove really nice, like stock. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
hopefully it drove better than stock with trev programming. Several years ago I was considering buying an oem gated 599 from out of state, but talked out of it by a well known Indy who had seat time in one, said shifting was suboptimal, thought I would be disappointed coming from my gated 575, which shifts perfectly when warm. That was before trev figured out how to fix the 599 ecu programming for manual shift. I wonder how many oem 599 owners are willing to reflash their ecu for better shifts vs keeping their unicorns in original condition for collectibility…
High revving, low inertia engines tend to protest at slow and sloppy shifting. I bet changing your driving style would help a lot.
Ok, fair enough, but all it takes is one bad link in the chain. That bad link is Art. You will find out soon enough.
The plot thickens, I was originally on EAG's side but I just don't think anyone should trust him anymore.
Not gonna lie...I like the flat look of the original gear selector plate better than the con-curve 430 style one. Also is it me or does the gate throw distance seem shorter than the factory one? The factory one seem thinner and longer...the EAG one looks fatter and shorter. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
The fact that cost of parts were $1,000 for each kit and these were sold for $10-20k really says alot. The new normal guy video shows hbi bought 110 kits for $100,000. crazy. honestly this whole thing is turning me off from converting the car at this point. even with the dr S kit its not worth it i think anymore.
Don't let all this deter you It IS DEFINITELY worth it if you like driving a 6spd Look for my many posts about what it's like to drive You will not regret it
Driving is greatly enhanced. Goes from sleepy single handed coffee in other hand to now my wife won't join if taking the F430.
I’m diggin’ the numbered plate with carbon shift knob. I understand stamping a Cavallino would be prohibited for these conversion kits. I would opt for numbered shift plates + carbon shift knob so it looks less plain.
What was said in the video was: $100k for 100 kits, plus $3k per kit once installed This was for kits coming from the China manufacturing setup. My guess here is their raw cost per kit was somewhere between $1k and $2k and Art needed the $100k cash infusion, expecting that they'd install enough kits along the delivery timeline of the 100 kits to makeup for the cost. 10 kits per 21 days is interesting though -- 210 days or ~ 7 months -- if I were in HBIs shoes that means I was expecting 100 converted cars within about a 9 month timeline. At a customer cost of $35k...$3.5m/9 month or ~$4.5m/yr in conversion revenue at a hardware cost of $400k? [($1k purchase + $3k residual / car) * 100 cars]. My total cost to convert was: $13,000 for Dr. S's Cambio Manuale kit $3,241.65 for new ECUs and 360Trev tuning $2,000 to my very trustworthy mechanic for conversion + wiring and a few minutes of my time correctly programming the cluster grand total of $18,241.65 immediately after finishing the conversion I set off on a ~5,000 mile roadtrip with a few other cars and friends -- car performed flawlessly and was the most fun car in the bunch to drive with its new gated six speed -- I've got about ~10,000 miles on the car since the conversion and couldn't be happier. I've been considering adding a spider to convert as well. The F1 has its place, especially the later years with the faster shifting...but nothing beats a proper manual and I was very happy with my Dr. S experience -- his customer experience was top notch. I've been meaning to post a full documentation of my experience but I'll save that for another post. I steered far clear of EAG because of the multitude of documented issues and customer cars languishing for months/years...and now I'm even more glad I did.
I think this is still very wrong. I know that $100k for 100 kits is quoted but its absolutely not correct to suggest that was for a complete kit. It must only be a price of 'some parts of the kit' (it wasn't a complete kit) and maybe that's where the confusion lies because its impossible to make that kit for $1k, even in China. As suspected there are quite a few inaccuracies and half-truths in many of these social media videos, and that based on just what I know to be true. Take everything you watch with a healthy dose of cynicism. Its very easy to jump to conclusions but as lawyers watching all of this know, you need evidence and much of it is highly speculative.
I'm quoting from the video directly, though I agree we don't know yet whether it is 100% truthful. I believe they should have shared the contract in the video to prove their version of events. video source: timestamp 1:35: "we made a deal, I bought 10 kits from him at a pretty steep discount...started lining up customers" timestamp 2:43: "lets go in together on kits, you can install them, all I want you to do is cover the cost of the kits that it cost me for the raw materials from China, thats where they build them at. I said alright well I'll have my lawyer draw up a contract and we'll see what we can make happen. We did a contract which is I will wire him close to $100,000 to cover my 100 kits and in turn I will get 10 kits every 21 days until the 100 kits is reached starting 21 days after contract....that was in July of 2022." I agree with you there may be more to the story here as that price sounds way too good to be true, but if Evan publishes the contract and that's what it says, Art should have upheld the terms of the contract. My point here is Evan is very clear in what he says, "close to $100k to cover my 100 kits", not $100k to cover 10 kits
Yes, but Evan owed 3k per kit as a royalty after each installation. So technically he is paying 4k per kit. I think the 100 kits at a 100k and kits sent to him over time was a clever way for Art to get some cash up front and deal with the rest later. So in the beginning Art got 100k for 10 kits and didn't fulfill on the rest. Image Unavailable, Please Login
He did mention raw materials. Maybe it was to bulk buy aluminum billet and other parts prior to the actual production process?
Whats your experience with production in China? Looking at the picture, with the right connections, thats around $800-1200 per kit when produced in a 100 pc batch.
