Nice episode, well done. My Dad, Uncle, and I built a Manta Montage. I remember going with my Dad to the factory in Costa Mesa. Tim and my Dad worked together to put air conditioning in the montage. Dad’s car was number 37 in the production run and it was McLaren orange. I remember people following us home to ask about the car or take pictures. But that was a long time ago, my Dad sold the car to a Japanese businessman, he exported it to Japan. Well Dad I miss you, those were good memories, Godspeed.
For some reason alot of kit cars end up in Florida so I've personally seen 3 mantas and drove one LS powered. It was a go-kart from hell and handled like it. It borderlines on not being heavy enough for its own good. The front tires only suggest where to go and the ass end loves to trade with the front. The suspension parts are meant for cars much heavier than it is so that plays a part. I'd be terrified to seriously race one but in good hands it'd be unbeatable. Can't see shit driving it on the road so there's that. It has the fiero syndrome where you feel like you're going faster than you are being so low to the ground. I race supersport motorcycles and ride a liter bike on the street and that car scares me. For anyone with one, spend the money on sticky tires and good brakes because it doesn't have to weight to stop without locking up and sliding. Its cool to see you cover this car. More people know about sterling novas more often than this one. Nice video
Ease of registration. You can register just about anything in Florida so it makes sense that they either end up there or had initial registration there. Plus the demographic of people living there, older folks with expendable income along with wealthier residents near beaches wanting a cruise car.
@CreamAle you know that didn't occur to me. I've spent most of my life in Florida and South Carolina so my knowledge of vehicle regulations between states is lacking. Florida does have processes for kit cars specifically and no inspections. I just didn't put 2 and 2 together on that one lol. Good call.
@@ValkyriesMoon yeah for sure. it's why CleetusMcfarland and the BoostedBoiz can have those wild cars on the road legally. Like that Tesla swapped odyssey or even Leroy, the previously exocaged Corvette he has. Florida is wildly easy for that stuff whilst California is one of the more tough states to get away with things like that. Cherish your state's freedom with registration, because that stuff will go away eventually, sadly.
@@dr.burtgummerfan439 They do draw attention! The Mirage is the one car that would literally stop traffic when I took it out. Had people stop in the middle of an intersection just to look at it. Now I've got to get busy and get it back on the road. Rebuilding it from the ground up with new suspension, engine, trans, etc. Loved the old CanAm cars and the Mirage was as close as I could get to owning one!
I worked for several years at Manta cars glad to see someone do a proper video on the car and company. I had the pleasure of being friends with the brothers and their family, very nice people. Also worked on a race team when Brad was racing formula ford. He also owned a Ford Pantera.
I owned the only Manta that was factory built with a rear wing molded into the body like the McLaren 2:36 It was red with a black wing. 327 powered and fast AF. I got it certified by the CHP, had a VIN # put on it, license plates and drove that thing everywhere. Absolutely NOTHING got more attention that that car. Thanks for the history lesson
My how stupid you were to put a vehicle inventory number on the car you bought that was built from the factory and then contracting with a third-party department called the DMV to get license plates that are purely for driving 4 commerce... Super smart now you gave the DMV 1/10 possession of the private car you paid for through ignorance 😅... Never register the car with anybody unless you are making money on the side of the road with that said car because then you would be considered profit "for hire"
@@buzzwaldron6195 go sit in the corner and put your head down 🙇♂️ because you know nothing of what you're speaking of and your ignorance is speaking volumes 🤡 🤦♂️
Thank you for posting this! I've been a viewer for a while and couldn't believe when the thumbnail came up for this video! The Mirage was my fantasy vehicle when I was a teenager, and to be honest probably still is lol. There is one local to me here in southern Ontario, it usually shows up at the annual car show in my city. Keep up the great work!
Kit Car magazines were a fixture when I was a gear head growing up, the Manta Mirage was a CanAm car for the street. Just awesome especially for the era!
As a young man I always wanted to buy one of those I had acquired the Corvair transaxle all the parts to put one together never had enough money to buy the kit I was going to build a 283 a high RPM I still have the original brochure
I built a mirage in memory of my daughter. With my son James and lost him at 24 Due to a medical emergency! He never got to see the mirage finished his ashes hang on the rear view mirror in the video❣️ he is with me❤️ It’s the orange mirage in the video! Super cool video I’ve never driven a car that you can drive 50 miles an hour plus around a 25 mph turn!I love it and will be passed down in the Lee family Kirk lee
I was almost going to send you the link Kirk. I'm glad you saw it. I still have to get mine back together and on the road. Hope to get more done this year on it. Then rebuild the Montage T as well. Paul
I was, with a buddy at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin in, I think, the late '80s when we came upon a red coupe. Knowing nothing of the car, and always curious but no touch-y, I rolled around on the grass poking my eyeballs as deep as possible into the car's nooks and crannies to see what it was made of. Peeking through a gap in the rear, I saw the unmistakable shape of a '61-'63 Buick 215 cu in alloy V-8! I had been collecting junk ones in hopes of mixing and matching good parts to end up with a set of decent internals that I could put into a good block which would get installed in a lightweight Chevy Monza/Buick Banshee I was planning. I had found, meanwhile, that the alloy heads and steel crank, from Buick's '64 Wildcat 310 would work with the 215 Buick block and Ford 2.3 liter pistons to enlarge displacement to 305 cu in. Adding Kenne-Bell valvetrain bits, lightweight steel flywheel, and oiling mods would make it all live at power levels above 400HP. That was the REAL Kenne-Bell...back when they were only about Buick performance parts, instead of the belly-button stuff they sell now...A full-on 455 Wildcat with Kenne-Bell innards and accessories was both a thing of beauty and a screaming beast at the track! By that time, I had collected enough of the larger '64 heads and cranks to make 10 engines but needed cash. What the Hell!...I wrote brief note about the mods, name and number, on a slip of paper and wedged it between door frame and body. A week or so later I got a call from the owner and we arranged to meet at the next event at the track we would both be attending. Somewhere in the Midwest, there is/was a Manta Mirage with, at least for a time, 300 inches of very light, tightly packed, Kenne-Bell enhanced, Buick power! A photographer by hobby, I have few shots of the car..one out on the track with a slow-shutter speed blur!
The ultimate kit car story I know about appeared in the Classic & Sports Car magazine from the UK when a Studebaker dealer (from New Jersey, I think) in the 50's wanted a new Mercedes-Benz 300SL gull wing, but only in kit form. Mercedes-Benz, for some reason, agreed so they sold him the kit. Unfortunately, for him, he died before getting around to assembling it. Some lucky guy bought it as part of a deceased estate, so he now owns the only brand new 300SL with zero miles on the odometer, albeit in pieces, but probably with deteriorated rubber parts.
He was never a farmer, he came from Remuera in Auckland and his dad owned a garage. His kiwi contemporary Chris Amon however, came from a farming family near Bulls in the Manawatu.
I have a Mirage serial# 66. If I ever finish it, it will be brutal. It has a brand new over the counter LT1 from back in the day. Forged crank & pistons, pink rods, 6 quart baffled oil pan, double hump angle plug heads... All the good stuff from back in the day. But the way the car was built leaves a lot to be desired. Which is why it's not finished yet. It came with a Karman Ghia front suspension. That's right, VW. The disk brake pads are smaller than a hockey puck. It's a trailing arm suspension which means the camber changes equal to the body roll. They welded extensions to the steering knuckle's tie rod arms. All this is fine for a sand rail but not a high performance street car. I'm in the process of replacing all of it with an entire Pinto/Mustang-II setup with electric power steering. He mentioned the 4-speed Corvair transaxle. But he likely doesn't know the problems there. The Corvair was an air cooled 6 cylinder with the engine hanging past the rear axle pointing back like a Porsche. The crankshaft turns the "wrong" way. When you turn it the right way it's now turning backwards to the way it was designed to run. The Saginaw transmission doesn't care, but the puny 6-1/2" ring and pinion sure does. Now it's being driven on the coast side of the gears which creates a god awful racket. And the resulting loads on the differential case want to split the case in half. Dumping the clutch of a 350hp engine with fat rear tires is just gonna split that case right in half. Which means you have to baby the thing off the line. I still haven't come up with a good transaxle solution I can afford. There are other problems to solve but their easier to handle. That's the fun part.
Same here, and a legend on it's own, the crazy mid 80's racing Opel Mantas out of Germany in particular, Irmscher. If you aren't familiar, google 'irmscher manta' and go for pics - you won't regret it.
have one that needs a good home. bought it new in 77, now i'm old, 71. tons of goodies, was finished, bought new things to fix inherent shortcomings, they need installed comes with a car rotator. YT won't let me leave contact info as my last post was deleted
Awesome video! I have never heard of the Manta company and their cars until this video! I have 2 suggestions, could you do videos on Mosler and Vector cars?
Thanks for the trip back to the old days too the one stand out of the DIY era. I was so close to actually buying the Manta back then, really sorry I didn't...sure would look great sitting in between my 73L & 87 GT5-S Pantera's!
@@Spiritof_76 I don't know how much I'm bragging, I bought my 73 in 85 & the S 10 years later when no one really wanted them...should have bought Lambo's when no one wanted those.
Actually remember spotting a few of these on the road as a kid in the '80s. I've also read about one called the Valkyrie that was big block Chevy powered, but can't recall that I ever saw one of those in person.
Note to self... Do not gush about fiberglass production while the sparks are flying from what is obvious a spot welding machine tacking steel panels together.
I had one back in 77 it had been a show car doors had been changed to 1 piece gull wing hydraulic along with the tail section I painted it black with orange accents and an orange hour glass on the roof loved that car
Those brothers executed on a great idea. I've always found the Manta to be too much of a caricature of the M8 McLaren for my taste. That said, the Montage was a spot on replica of the M6GT, one of the greatest looking and performing cars of the era. The tube chassis Manta with the trans mounted GM engine/transmission from the Chevy Citation platform was a noble successor to all those VW based kit cars. The Montage body molds were passed around after the devise of Manta and were still in small production as recently as 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the chassis jig disappeared with the company so you are now on your own to build one. The Montage would be a great kit car to be reintroduced in this era with so many engine/transmission choices available to propel that little car.
@@-Jason-L On the contrary, it's the exact model, just a bit different headlight fixures. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Xll6h83NRjI.htmlsi=TL8OMFdphsKwpRXC
@@-Jason-L YES, it was. It was a Manta Montage in the first season. In the 2nd and 3dr seasons they used a modified DMC12, because the guy playing the character, Hardcastle (forgot his name) couldn't get in and out of the car. Look it up it's on google. I posted the link in my first answer but YT deleted it.
I got them to send me a catalog back in the late 70's, the Mirages were awesome looking. And boy how I looked down on that Montage, which was all the things that made people think kit cars were crap.
the Montage T looks nice, that one in that cute blue seen in 7:25 and 7:39. i think the nostalgia behind these cars is what makes it awesome. what i want to see is a production sportscar with like 1000ci displacement and like 4000HP on the wheels, the engine bay behind the driver would be like three feet longer than for a usual V12 6.0L engine, that is not to long and eligible for driving on publicly accessible roads. there are factories that race to make the fastest production car, its strange that they then dont make sportscars with powerful engines like that, that much HP would be enough for like 310mph.
The Manta Montage is the kit car I saw and wanted, in the back of a magazine when I was a kid. I, however, failed to read the "small print" which said you needed a Volkswagen chassis. Needless to say, and because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time, I didn't get one.
The gold manta montage and the blue one are v8 cars with 5 speed tranz. i own the blue one and my friend frank has the gold one that makes a you turn in your video.
My buddy bought one back in '74 and all of us in the shop pitched in and helped on it. Very nice kit except for the trans axle set up but he ended up getting a AMC proto type one at action in Michigan a year or so later.
Thank you for an enlightening video on a great car. The closest I will ever come to one is the Manta that was in a friend's fabrication shop for finishing many years ago. I have a model kit of the Hardcastle and McCormick Coyote, which I believe was built from a Manta Montage, but I could be mistaken. Larry Landis
I’ve followed the kit car industry for almost 40 years. While the vast majority of them are not good (putting it politely), a small percentage are the greatest cars and deals on the planet when engineered and built well. I don’t fault anyone for wanting or having a kit car of lower quality, but there are some great choices out there if look deep enough and weed out the poor ones.
Just the movie view gone in 60 seconds. Born in 1956 boy those were the days, well not to old to dream. Thanks yes I remember cheap gas. Dam opec and the days of gas wars in Joplin mo.❤ thank you!!
I had a friend in the Navy who got out in San Diego and had ordered one of these and had begin assembling the suspension pieces when I transferred overseas and lost track of my buddy. I have wondered over the years if he ever finished it.
Owned/built a Manta Mirage powered by a 3.5 liter Buick V8 (215 cu. in.) 1980-86. The Buick was aluminum block with Formula 1 racing heritage (won F1 in 1962 I believe).
Check out Factory Five Racing for modern kit cars - their 818 coupe kit weighs about 2200lbs or so and uses a Subaru WRX powertrain (though only the rear wheels are driven. If 270hp (or more, depending on mods) in a one-ton vehicle isn't enough, check out their GTM kit - LS V8 power and various Corvette parts to keep costs down, along with a bespoke body & chassis. They're not the only kit car builders, either, there are several other builders on both sides of the pond.
@flyboy3633 Hey man sounds like you have a really cool project that your still in the process of building when i read about your problem with putting the HP throughout the driveline and it splitting into two. a thought came to me. would you be able thr get a complete drivetrain off a C5 Vette? i dont know what measurements you’re working with as far as the cars total length but even if it was a little bit longer if your a good welder you could always make it a bit longer so that the corvettes c5 LS1 that has the driveline that connects to the transmission. is there a way for that to work? i know it’s a front mounted engine and trans in back if there’s a way to just use the driveline for your application. i dont know JUST tossing ideas out there for you buddy! take care C K
Manta, the closest thing you could get to a McLaren can am type car for the street, at least in looks. How fast is it well how actually good is the suspension and engine?
My great uncle, (Grandma's brother), built one. I think he bought it from an individual in unfinished condition. He was in his sixties when he started. It took years to correct the things he felt were wrong and complete the project. He did finish it. However, i think he was too old to enjoy it. Later, as his health failed, I tried to buy it when the family began to talk about selling. I couldn't close a deal and it went to someone outside the family. I never got to hear it run. Sad really.
A drug dealer by the name of Spencer had one of these in Bricktown NJ during the '80s. He eventually got arrested and his Manta Mirage sat in the parking lot by the Bricktown PD for a few years. After all that time parked outside it was a basket case.
First season car was a Montage... www.google.com/search?q=Hardcastle+and+McCormick+First+season+car+&newwindow=1&sca_esv=f726501b840aca30&sca_upv=1&hl=en&source=hp&ei=7rZbZqfSItC75OUPo9v-iA4&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZlvE_sId_lY3ETbUEHh7c9XabpE1Eizq&ved=0ahUKEwingcegz7uGAxXQHbkGHaOtH-EQ4dUDCBg&uact=5&oq=Hardcastle+and+McCormick+First+season+car+&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IipIYXJkY2FzdGxlIGFuZCBNY0Nvcm1pY2sgRmlyc3Qgc2Vhc29uIGNhciAyBhAAGBYYHjILEAAYgAQYhgMYigUyCxAAGIAEGIYDGIoFMgsQABiABBiGAxiKBTIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiiBBiJBTIIEAAYgAQYogRI_aUBUABYq2lwAHgAkAEBmAH_BqABhjKqAQ4wLjEuMTQuMy4xLjEuMbgBA8gBAPgBAfgBApgCFKACzi3CAhEQLhiABBixAxjRAxiDARjHAcICCxAAGIAEGLEDGIMBwgILEC4YgAQY0QMYxwHCAg4QLhiABBixAxiDARiKBcICDhAuGIAEGLEDGNEDGMcBwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAg4QABiABBixAxiDARiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgILEC4YgAQYxwEYrwHCAgcQABiABBgKwgIGEAAYBxgewgIGEAAYCBgewgIEECEYCpgDAJIHCjAuMS4xMy40LjKgB8PKAQ&sclient=gws-wiz
Never underestimate American engineering, right... Buy a big engine on E-Bay, and put it into a garage project. End of story. Job done. thats not how supercars are made in the rest of the world.
