Tales From The Grift: A Free Honda S2000, Plus All The Hardtops We Can Paint

And to think, I'm out here paying cash for MY race cars!

Welcome to Tales From The Grift, where I will be sharing some outrageous stories of greed, corruption, bribery, and good clean fun from the autojourno game. At the end of every story, I’ll estimate the taxable value of all the free stuff involved, just for the heck of it.

Back in 2007, when my co-workers and clients asked me why I was racing a Ford Focus, I told them “Because it’s only marginally more expensive than owning a new Lamborghini Gallardo.” That was a lie; it was much more expensive than owning a new Gallardo. At the time, I could have done a 7-year loan on a brand-new Verde Ithaca example for $2,520 a month, all in. By contrast, I rarely had a NASA weekend that cost me less than four G. I was renting from this fellow named Leo Capaldi, who would get drunk and brag about how he got free body parts from Ford then send me a bill for $750 when I dented a front fender that he would then pull out with a suction tool.

(I got so annoyed with this scurrilous practice that I demanded, and got, custody of my right front fender from the 2007 NASA National Championships, where I finished 2nd but got demoted for contact after the fact. It’s now hanging in a storage unit.)

After a few years of renting I decided that it would be cheaper to own my race cars. In the case of my Neon, that’s kind of true. I’ve done a lot of SCCA and NASA weekends that cost me under a thousand bucks, or at least not much more than that. It’s not true of my Accord, which eats tires at the rate of $2100 an hour, or my Radicals. But in all four cases I’m doing sucker’s math, because I actually paid for my cars.

The smart way to do it? Demand a brand-new $32,000 car to go racing in the SCCA’s Showroom Stock and Touring classes. Then demand a free hardtop for that car, because you can’t go racing without a hardtop. Then keep that car as long as you like, and keep the cash when you sell it. What does it cost you? Nothing but a series of glowing reviews for the company’s other products. That’s the golden ticket, boys — and that’s the story I’m about to tell.