As we noted in our show overview yesterday, Carlisle isn't your normal car gathering. You don't walk the aisles saying, "Oooh, that's cool!" about every single car. While you might look one way at a very impressive Volvo 1800, you'll turn the other way to see some guy who thinks he's Cole Trickle standing next to his abomination of a Monte Carlo-based NASCAR replica. Here's a breakdown of Motive's good, bad, and just plain ugly from one of our favorite shows.

In a kit-car world dominated by Ford replicas, you gotta have agates of aluminum monocoque to wave the bowtie flag. Enter Mongoose Motorsports. The more iconic offering in the MM tent is certainly their Grand Sport Corvette Stingray racer, but it's the more wedge-like GTP that grabbed our attention.

The GTP is a replica of the 1984 Lola-built Corvette prototype run in IMSA and Le Mans–style racing at the time. The tube-frame chassis underneath bears a C6 Corvette's LS7 V-8 and a C5 suspension. A turn-key (i.e., built-for-you) model will run you an Abe Lincoln shy of $100K.

As ubiquitous as they are, Cobra replicas may as well be handed out with admission tickets at Carlisle. Although blending in might be a good thing ever since Carroll Shelby became a purveyor of chili powder and cease-and-desist orders, it's nevertheless getting harder to stand out with a Cobra — and that's exactly the obstacle that Backdraft has overcome with this BDR Roadster.

Black-and-orange, orange-and-black: the GT3 RS has made that combo white hot, but we've yet to see it applied so boldly to an otherwise faithful Cobra repro. If the paint fails to garner looks, the burble from the Roush-tweaked Ford V-8 underhood plays a convincing pied piper for gearheads.

The idea is simple: Build a light tubular chassis and swaddle it in a fiberglass body inspired by vintage motorsport; something from the '50s or '60s. Add in high performance components — in this case aluminum suspension from a C4 Corvette and a Chevy small block V-8 — and you have the makings of an ultra-light and ultra-fast sports car.

The Dragon is arguably the best-looking roadster ever, and it's hard to argue with a curb weight that would balance a scale against an early Honda CRX.

If you follow the replica business, you know that Factory Five is one of the leaders in the arena of Cobra and Daytona Coupe clones. Still, the company wants to spread beyond merely aping someone else's design. Like Ford tuner Saleen, Factory Five sought to build something uniquely its own, and here it is: the new 'Vette-powered GTM supercar.

Look closely and you'll recognize some GT40 lines here, particularly in the greenhouse. Nevertheless, the GTM is a true exotic with a bit more polish than you'd expect from a freshman effort.

Chuck Beck is a living legend in the replicar business, building faithful copies of Porsche's ultra-rare 550 Spyder and 356s on his own production line in South America. Now, the Porsche-loving Californian has begun his latest venture with a convincing take on the Porsche 904 racecar.

There's some irony in the fact that Butzi Porsche designed the real car with weight-saving fiberglass panels: Beck's been using the material for years. Still, Beck's 904 — with lots of structural updates — weighs in at 1650 lb, slightly heavier than the original car's three-quarter tons.

Automobiles based on the venerable air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle's chassis have been a backbone of the kit-car industry since the earliest days. Among them, one of the most iconic is the Meyers Manx dune buggy.

Back in the day, open-top dune bugs ruled the beaches, and the Manx in particular achieved star status when it was featured (with Corvair power) as Steve McQueen's ride in The Thomas Crowne Affair. The classic design of the Manx works as well today as it did back then, looking even better with the larger diameter wheels that are now common fitment.

The market for classic '50s Chevy Bel Airs continues to grow, sending values skyrocketing and even spurring production of all-new steel replicas. For those who can't afford either, there's the EasyRods Belaro. Its pseudo-'50s styling won't fool anyone, but it's not designed to. It's supposed to be a good conversation piece for your driveway and an easily identifiable landmark for the men in white coats when they're called to cart you away.

Not a real car as much as the punch line for a bad Jeff Foxworthy joke. Just like a Winston Cup car, the "stock" is purely vestigial, but this new rolling chassis from Breeze Automotive certainly gets you about as close to a "stocker" as you're going to get on the road.

Few details are available on the kit, which isn't even on the company's website yet. However, a rolling chassis was on display at Carlisle. Build one and you're sure to make your neighbor with the Jeff Gordon Edition Monte Carlo SS feel like the poseur he most certainly is.

Ambiguously vintage Le Mans–inspired forms like the EM578 were once a staple in the kit-car industry. Made popular in the 1980s by the so-called "Coyote-X" star car in the P.I. series Hardcastle and McCormick, the genre has thinned over the years. Only one such car could be found this year at Carlisle — the EM578 by EM Motors.

Rather than relying on an existing chassis, the EM578 uses its own design and is sold as a rolling chassis made to accept a Chevy small block mated to a Porsche 930/4 transaxle.

From a design standpoint, no one's going to mistake this thing for a Ferrari P4 or Porsche 917. Hell, nobody's going to mistake it for something that wasn't assembled by an engineering team that's too small to field an intramural rugby game. From its rearview mirrors on chintzy aluminum stanchions to body panels that double as funhouse mirrors, the EM578 is best appreciated by those who also wear reproductions of Steve McQueen's leather jacket from Le Mans — and can't understand why people are sniggering at him for that, either.

The MR360 from MRM takes a classic kit-car idea and applies it in a more modern way. Back in the day, the choice mid-engined donor car was the Pontiac Fiero — resulting in a frighteningly large number of "Fierraris" rolling about with Iron Dukes driving their rear wheels. Those are hardly flat-plane V-8s. The MR360 uses the slightly newer and more sorted Toyota MR Spyder as its basis, covering the Toyota's chassis in oversized fiberglass panels and support parts to make a poor man's Ferrari 360 Spyder. Unlike some of the more convincing Lambo kits we've seen, we don't think the 360 will be fooling anyone at a Ferrari concours. However, unlike some of the less convincing Lambo kits we've seen, this one won't even fool your jailbait prey in the McDonald's drive-thru.