[David Kirkham]

Originally Posted by 750hp

The pressure! As if installing an engine into ANY car, let alone a polished Kirkham isn't stressful enough - to do it in front of news cameras must have had everyone's nerves on edge!!!

David, I work at a facility over here in Australia that has 7 hospitals on the one campus - including one of the premier children's hospitals in the southern hemisphere. I was talking to an Executive Director about what you were doing, with a view to considering how we might draw inspiration from what you have done and to look at innovative ways to raise funds in future local events.

We looked through your website (as much for the novelty of me being able to surf Cobra stuff on the web during work hours), but I also did so because there's so little (if any) information currently available on the Festival website.

My concern is that the KSL news piece reiterated what the Festival site says - that the event is an INVITATION ONLY silent auction. Without Kirkham or the car currently seemingly mentioned on the Festival website, and with only a week to go, I'd hate to see it only bid up to the kind of crazy "cents in the dollar" prices that your first couple of Ebay cars went for...

Are you sure there's not a way to run it as an Ebay auction (hit them up for a fee-free listing), with the finish time during prime time of the Festival. Set up a video projector there and have a "mock" auctioneer calling out the updating and ever increasing price for the last 5 or 10 minutes. Everyone has wireless / portable internet connections and Blackberrys, etc, etc these days, so not only do the the invitation only tree-buyers have a chance to bid, but so does the rest of the world.

As always, only a suggestion with the best interests of your incredibly generous gesture at heart.

Oh, and about the car itself - WOW!!! The Exec Director said to me "It's good to see what your car looks like now that I've seen this one". I had to politely explain that my glass bodied locally manufactured version paled into insignificance against cars like KMP0623...!

We are working with the hospital right now to figure out the best way to auction the car. We are looking into a way to have proxy bidding on the car. The hospital already had several calls and they were wondering how to take care of it all. I'll post info as soon as I have it.

Here is another clip on KSL that just ran.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=8793537

David