I have experience of dealing with Hawk, Ram and Pilgrim back in the day.
I built a Hawk 6, basically Hawk's Cobra chassis but with AC ACE rather than AC Cobra bodywork (narrower arches) and used modified TR6 running gear. Like most kit manufacturers there wasnt much by way of printed build instructions but Gerry Hawkridge usually returned calls quickly. I built it as a joint project with a work colleague and got the mechanicals finished off by Adrian Cocking of Ram Automotive as they were well reccommended in cobra circles and were based near where i was working. Adrian was amazingly knowledgeable and helpful. It felt like an old British sports car to drive just a lot faster and with very secure handling.
I bought an already built Pilgrim Sumo Cobra replica. This car wasn't great, it didnt handle- Pilgrim said it needed harder, shorter springs which i fitted and made it rather worse. The prop shaft ran at an absurd angle due to the offset position of the diff on the IRS (Mk2 Granada; this caused it to keep breaking prop UJs and it ate a gearbox by putting too much sideways pressure on the output shaft. Pilgrim said it was unfortunate but hard to avoid, blaming the design of the donor IRS (so why did they use it). Having said that i drove it a year in all weathers for daily commuting and not much else broke. The 2.8 carb engine it came with gave average performance and the car handled so poorly that for once i didnt want any more power. The guy I sold it to unfortunately managed to roll it over within a week of buying it breaking several bones and leaving the car as a badly distorted chassis and a pile of fibreglass bits. The guys at Pilgrim were ok to deal with but didnt like any criticism of their design which i guess was understandable.
This was in the days before Internet forums so kit makers could often get away with major flaws so long as they kept on the right side of the magazine journalists and weren't blatantly selling downright death traps. From what i have heard the later Sierra based ones Sumos handled an awful lot better and kept on getting better in stages with plenty of people fitting small block Ford V8s.
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