NASCAR Race Truck Sold as Street-Legal Gets Seller Arrested

Welcome once again to Leato's Law. Here's Steve Leato. — I often gripe about how modern NASCAR stock car racing uh doesn't actually use stock cars. So, it's a misnomer. And back in the old days, they actually did use stock cars. It was not uncommon for a person to drive their car to the track, race it, and then drive home in it because the cars were that close to the ones that were on the road. Sometimes they'd modify them slightly, do things like, you know, make sure the doors were shut by like, you know, uh, wrapping them with something. Uh, also they do things like put stuff over the headlights, but many of the cars still had headlights on them in the early years of NASCAR. And so, you know, these cars were street legal and strictly stock, they called it. So, this headline from a story a lot of people sent me uh does strike me as ironic and proving my point about modern stock car racing, although it involves a truck, but close enough. Police arrest man for trying to pass off NASCAR race truck as a street legal Chevy S10. Now, there's a couple interesting twists to the story beyond just trying to pass it off, and we'll get there. Caleb Jacobs wrote this for the drive. A man in Pennsylvania faces a felony, fraud, theft, and deception group of charges after state police accused him of illegally disguising a NASCAR race truck as street legal. Uh the guys from Williamsport allegedly swapped a vehicle identification number plate onto the truck that did not belong to it originally. He reportedly then used that VIN to title a purpose-built track vehicle for road use. And so the real problem here is the VIN swap. uh it is against the law to pry a VIN off one vehicle and just slap it on another and then sell that thing into the stream of commerce. Um so that's really the issue, but there are some other things going on here, too. Pennsylvania State Police issued a press release saying the truck was advertised as a street legal 1999 Chevy S10 in an eBay listing. That ad for sale claimed the conversion was performed by its former NASCAR owner, though said former owners explicitly denied the claim. A physical examination of the vehicle by investigators confirmed it was not street legal. So apparently some of this had been disclosed with a history. It's just a question of how street legal it was and so on. The auction house later sold the truck for $10,000. So, you can see the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Racer for sale uh on a website for Carile Auctions. It features pretty much everything you'd expect to see on a converted race vehicle, which some companies specialize in, like a license plate, inspection sticker, an emissions sticker, and it also does have headlights, high and low beam, turn signals, and a horn. By the way, it's still missing a lot of stuff that a street vehicle would have. So, photos show the truck when it ran at the NASCAR Bristol Dirt Race in 2023. Looks almost identical now, except the headlights and tail lights are functional units. The truck's previous iteration only had stickers to make it look like it had them. The Silverado body truck even runs the same 406 cubic inch V8 as it did back in its glory days. The major issue here, according to the Pennsylvania State Police, is that um someone may have fraudulently installed a VIN plate from an unrelated vehicle. That's why law enforcement has thrown the book at him. Officially is being charged with dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities, alteration or destruction of a vehicle identification number, theft by deception, forgery, criminal use of communication facility, deceptive business practices, false application for a certificate of title registration, tampering with public records, and uh violations with the board of vehicles. So, I'm not even sure what some of those are, but they all sound bad. Exactly what's necessary to make a competition vehicle street legal varies from state to state. Some argue the truck should have met the requirements if it simply featured headlights, tail lights, the turn signals, and a horn. However, the Pennsylvania State Police clearly does not agree. So, just in case you're curious, uh, for a long time now, when vehicles are raced in racing series like that, so I'll tell you right now, my expertise is with these cars, the Dodge Daytona from 1969, they raced in 70, and also the Plymouth Superbird, which raced in 1970. Those were not cars from dealerships that were simply sold to race teams. Um, even at that point in time, the cars came from the manufacturer. But because a car like that's not going to have regular seats in it or regular drivetrain in it or things like that, Chrysler would ship those cars to a place called Nichols

Engineering and Nicholls Engineering would get them what they call body and white. They hadn't even paint painted yet. And they would come missing a lot of stuff they didn't need. And they would do all kinds of stuff like put the roll cages in and there's uh frame stiffeners underneath the hood. Um and there's all kinds of stuff that the car would get. But there's all kinds of stuff the car was shipped without. And so I have to imagine that they're probably doing that today with the truck series and everything else where they actually in the races are actually using the base of an actual vehicle that you buy at a dealership. I don't believe the cars that are raced like say for instance at the Daytona 500 these days um they don't start out as cars at a dealership. Some guy goes, "Hey, I'm going to buy this car and I'm going to race it in NASCAR. " No, no. Those cars are so far from stock. That's not what's happening. But if the car starts out as a Chevy, um it's it's leaving the factory missing a lot of stuff it does not need to race. In the old days, it was not a whole lot of stuff that you think about. Nowadays, what about airbags, for instance? Just one thing that popped into my head. Um I have a sneaky feeling this vehicle does not have airbags. Now, the question is, if the vehicle didn't have airbags and it was used, could you still sell it? I'm sure you probably could. Uh, it depends on the state, I suppose, and I don't know, but the point is that that's the first thing that popped into my head was I highly doubt that this car, this truck ever had airbags. Um, and probably some other things. But the crazy part of the story to me, besides the fact that it's a stock truck and you can't drive it street legally originally in the condition it was in when it left racing. Original NASCAR, you could actually take the cars off the track and drive them home. You could cuz they were strictly stock. That's that that's what they raced. Over the years, it's evolved into something completely different. I understand that. But the real thing here is that I'm surprised that the truck with a race pedigree is only worth $10,000. I would have thought it'd be worth more than that. I could be wrong. But of course, I would be thinking of its value as having a race pedigree. and the idea that oh no uh it's now street legal and it's got a VIN you can title it because that's another thing that even these cars were missing back in the day. So I have had the opportunity to not only drive the car this model's based on but I've examined that car its entire surface inside and out. Likewise, I've done that with Richard Petty's winged car, uh, Plymouth Superbird, and I've also done that with, uh, a couple other cars, Ramo Stats Superbird, which is owned by a good friend of mine. And those cars were not delivered with vehicle identification numbers. They were not. And so, for instance, many of them would have a tag on them that was applied by Nicholls Engineering, but the tag was simply two letters and, I believe, two digits. and it was someplace on the firewall, but it was not a vehicle identification number in that sense because those cars were never registered with a state and didn't have titles like that. I believe they were all sold with bills of sale. So, to me, it's wild that you can buy a former race truck from the Craftsman truck series for 10 grand. That sounds like a good deal to me, but I wouldn't want one that somebody said, "Oh, no. I made it street legal. I got all the lights working and tail lights working, turn signals working, it's got all that stuff. And the fact of the matter is, well, I guess it'd be nice to have one that you can drive, but you know, if I had this vehicle here, I don't want to make that street legal. So, I guess it's a matter of taste. But the real problem here is that if you found the vehicle identification number on this truck and traced its history, the police are saying it will trace back to a different vehicle. And that's not supposed to happen. Vehicle identification numbers are supposed to be unique. They're I suppose there probably been some examples out there where they haven't been unique, but they are supposed to be, and there should not be confusion like that. So, if there is in fact the incorrect VIN on the vehicle, that's a problem. So, I know a lot of people who said, "Gee, um, if you got that vehicle for $10,000, would you really feel ripped off? " And like I said, I don't have a problem with the price, and it might be cool to have a truck with a 400 and some odd cubic inch engine. That might be cool. That might be cool, but I wouldn't want it modified to be driven on the street. I just like to keep it the way it was. But again, the real problem is with the VIN and they say the police say and the prosecution, they say that the real problem is passing it off as having been properly

titled and registered and all that stuff when they say that wasn't done. So that was the allegations. We'll see what happens. Caleb Jacobs wrote that for the drive, but police have arrested a man in Pennsylvania for trying to pass off a NASCAR race truck from the Craftsman truck series as a streetle legal Chevy S10. questions or comments, put them below. Let us talk to you later. Bye-bye. — Thank you for watching Leato's Law. Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand.