Lawsh, You should give Kevin (CoolRydesCustoms) Zager a call and talk to him before pulling the trigger. He does some really nice cars that are functional for what ever you want.
He also has his own StopTech disc brake set ups.
VS has to many issues of late and it's not like your a local...
I've had a half-dozen half posts put together with graybeard sage advice, but didn't send them for one reason or another.
To take a few things one by one: Lars needs a pan-based car. More than that, he needs a car with a Norwegian VW pan (or at least VIN). This rules out a lot of really good stuff: Intermeccanica, Beck, etc.
A Beck (Special Edition) is not a pan-based car (not the back 1/3, none of it). Thunder Ranch built one like El Frazoo describes, and JPS jumped on the bandwagon, but apparently nobody is doing the hybrid frame any more.
On the surface, that leaves him the choice of JPS or Vintage Speedsters. I could never recommend John Steele to anybody, but especially to somebody so easily bilked via a long-distance transaction. Kirk would be a much better choice, but the longer Lars's list gets, the less chance he's actually going to get what he wants. When he started with the 5-speed stuff, I was ready to tell him to cool his jets a bit.
However, Bill has a GREAT idea here. Mendeola, CoolRydesCustoms, Kevin Zagar (all the same thing) has built speedsters from the ground up for clients before, and he'd allow Lars the freedom to source his engine and transaxles from anywhere he wished. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Kirk sources engines from guys nobody ever heard of-- if I lived 8 timezones away, I wouldn't consider anybody but Pat Downs.
Anyhow, I know there are nits to pick with Kevin's suspension stuff (for a perfectionist idiot-savant like some bald guy I know, and a bunch of armchair engineers over on the Samba) but it's 99% of the way there, and an order of magnitude better than anything else he's likely to get.
With Kevin Zagar, Lars could get an IRS car, with a super beefed-up rear suspension, and a full A-arm front suspension. He could probably get the 16" wheels he'd like. Kevin would probably be able to source a VS body for the project, and build off whatever pan Lars would like to provide.
The car will cost 2x what a VS would, but it'd be 2x better. It's brilliant.
Another idea is to do what "Longfella" is doing, and having Vintage Motorcars (that's a different company, Lars) do all the suspension and bodywork, and other good shops do the things they are good at. This would require somebody on the ground in SoCal, but it might be possible to hire an LA guy from this site for a couple thousand dollars to be the general contractor. If I lived there, I'd love to do it-- it'd be a fun way to stay in the absolute center of the hobby, and spend other people's money. Perhaps there's somebody willing, but I don't know.
Either way, the longer the grocery-list gets, the less likely it is that Vintage Speedsters is going to scratch the itch. If you keep it simple, you'll be happier. If it gets pretty wild, I'd go a different direction.
The list is getting pretty exotic.