I'm not giving up quite yet!
With respect to the stuff that cost about $10K at Demon Tweeks I selected only FIA approved items from top notch suppliers. If Sabelt FIA belts and Lifeline FIA extinguishers aren’t good enough for DP I don’t think it’s because of quality or FIA regs.
I think the heart of the problem of $600K for a spaceframe and glass fibre car using a commonly available V-8 is factory cost base and productivity.
Firstly nobody has ever consistently made money selling racing cars. Lotus was building 9 cars a month in the 1960's and pulled out. Lola built only upmarket cars in the end but went bust. Today there is, in practical terms, no UK customer racing car industry, the nearest is Radical who build track cars (and whose monthly build rate is the same as Lotus in the 60's). The only customer race car builder left is Dallera in Italy.
As a modern benchmark for the Coyote under discussion Radical now build a coupe with a Ford turbo V 6. It has a spaceframe, lots of aero design and a pretty full spec. (i.e. electrical fire system, data logger, on board air jacks, carbon wings, cockpit brake bias) so in general principle it’s similar to the Coyote but obviously not built for 24 hr racing. It costs $150K in the UK or less than 1/3 of the Coyote.
Now, Il say again my main point - the coyote is NOT state of the art - it isn’t a 1,000 bhp group C type car with massive venturi's generating 5,000 lb of download and full carbon monocoque to take the resultant loads for 24 hrs - its just a tube and glass fibre car with a modified mass production engine. That’s really not so far away from the Radical coupe.
So why over three times as much?
I think its that the builders have no volume and a big, flashy factory with lots of people with important sounding names. When the UK had a race car industry the wages were low and the working conditions were poor. However it was highly productive. The average “factory" space was tiny, maybe 2,000 sq ft or so. Arch Motors mass built the spaceframes for most makers and Specialised Mouldings churned out bodywork. Production runs in these small factories were large around 40 - 50 for an F3 car, 100 - 200 for a FF car.
Nobody made a profit despite that but low overheads, shared outsourcing and long runs kept prices down.
Today every race category seems to have unique rules and resultant small runs. I'm guessing but I suspect eh modern factories may be 10,000 sq ft with offices etc. and the runs per design maybe 20.
So I think the whole racing car industry has lost productivity through reduced volumes and inflated overheads. Now I can’t do anything about that (!) but if I blame anybody its race organisers who may well suffer with reduced grids. Just look at the boom in historic racing to see where this may be leading.