Tack, Bjorn! I'll do my best to answer your questions:
When I purchased the car, it had the original one-color seats from CMC. I recently had them recovered in September in a new, two-tone color scheme. I think there's one picture in that set showing the older seats -- I wanted a full picture of the speaker box but was too lazy to remove the tonneau cover to retake the picture, sorry for the confusion!
I would probably rate the condition of the chassis and pan at a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10 with the overall car at 8.5 out of 10 (compared to a 4 or 5 when I bought it! :) The pan is a 1974, so it's thirty years old. But it is the newer independent rear suspension with CV joints rather than the older swingarm design. As you probably know, they shorten these VW's and have to weld the frame rails and pan back together. I personally think that CMC could have done a cleaner job as you can still see the 45-degree angle cut and weld that they did around the seat pan area. Unfortunately, I have not seen any of the newer Vintage Speedsters to have a basis for comparison. This is just my (very picky) opinion :)
As far as the engine, I have often wondered the HP rating myself, but unfortunately I don't have a dyno available to test it. I had the engine built by a local VW shop and asked them to build something that was 1) reliable and 2) had good performance -- we opted for the 1776cc small block and dual-carb configuration. I personally did not want to an engine with thin walls that melted down after a hot summer in Arizona. I can dig up the invoice with exact specs and parts on the engine if you would like.
Farv
