Out of the rat race through cars

Out of the rat race through cars. CHANGE OF PACE. Life as the president and general manager for a major aerospace company got rusty for Severn Bridge’s Ed Konda, who now builds kit cars for his rat race. (Photo by Neil Etienne) Neil Etienne

GRAVENHURST - Ed Konda had to change his pace and leave the rat race.
Now slick rubber, sleek lines, hundreds of pounds of torque and open roads drive him.
About three years ago, the former president and GM of a major Fortune 500 aerospace company, whose background was engineering, hung up his tie for a tire iron and the road to success changed.
“I was done with the rat race; it got too much,” Konda said. “I told my wife I needed a change and I knew exactly what it was.”
Joining the world of early “retirement,” Konda purchased a kit car and set about building. The high-performance Factory Five 2009 GTM took him about a year to build, but in that time, a new, yet forgotten passion also began to build.
“I hadn’t touched a wrench for about 30 years but it felt right,” he said.
With a kit car, a person is supplied the steel tube frame, seats, lights, miles of wiring, glass for windows and the fibreglass to create the skin, he explained. “You also get this big, inches-thick instruction manual that basically says ‘good luck.’”
“You get half the parts and nothing fits; I just love those types of challenges,” he added, saying kit cars typically don’t come with any of the true guts, like a motor, transmission, steering column and so on. “The first one took about a year to build, but I took really good notes.”
Since his first trial, he’s built a second, 2010-model GTM and that was whittled down from a year to about four months of work. He explained in the first car he put a massive 505hp, high-performance Porsche engine that makes it something of “a sick monster” to its creator. The second, 2010 model has a 540hp Corvette engine driving it, but despite the horsepower, Konda described it as “mild, compared to the other.”
Konda said there are about 2,000 kit car producers around the world and his passion has parlayed into a new business venture for the former engineer building any one of those with his Ontario Kit Car Consultants business in Severn Bridge.
“I knew it was a very niche market and there’s really no one doing it,” he said. “But there’s a real artistic element to it, plus the challenge of building and figuring out how the kits is going to fit with all the things you want to put inside of it.”
Essentially only getting the framing for the vehicle, Konda’s challenges are typically helping people figure out how they will fit a particular engine into the frame, how the wiring and modern electronics will fit into a classic-style or replica frame, how the exhaust will travel and more.
“The bulk of my work now is when someone gets stuck and can’t go any further; sometimes they have the skills to build the frame but can’t figure out how to get something to fit,” he said. “Having done this for a while now, I have all kinds of ideas.”
He said the kit cars come in a huge variety from replica classics, to army vehicles, to motorcycles and trikes.
“You could call kit cars cross-breeds; they aren’t the same as any car out there, but they look a lot alike a lot of cars,” he said.
The Factory Five kits he tends to build most are a sleek, sporty-looking vehicle with hints of the most famed race or high-performance rides. He personally builds his own for shows and does not tend to drive them often, but his mainly Canadian clientele, at this point anyway, tend to drive theirs around to show off.
It’s not only the high-performance, slick race car-style vehicle he builds. He said one of his favourite projects was helping a customer build a reverse trike, essentially from the ground up with an old motorcycle frame. He had to reverse the wheels so two were at the front instead of the rear and eventually created a “200-mile-per-hour-toy.” He’s currently working on an early 1960s replica dune buggy and next up is a replica Porsche RX60, also an early 1960s speedster.
He said he missed last year’s Gravenhurst Antique and Classic Car Show, but intends to bring one of his two rides to the event, set for the weekend of June 15 at Gull Lake Rotary Park.
“When I’m driving either one of the GTMs, heads always turn,” he said. “It’s a far more satisfying life now; I enjoy the challenge and I can say I’m truly happy now.”

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