I dunno, maybe she was just a "proof_of_concept" for a new design... perhaps a competitor to lockheed's p-38. Or maybe she was a conceptual start-up, from there changes would have been done to make things right. Remember that designing during tis period was really straight forward. Instead of spending hundred's of man hours infront of drawing tables, they decided to build a p-40 with two engines, test it and start adding or substracting until something good came out of it... perhaps in just a few test flights enough feedback from the test pilots would have been enough to modify the prototype and build the new one.