It’s the worst nightmare of car enthusiasts everywhere. A member of the Porsche forum Rennlist left his 2016 Porsche 911 GT3 RS at the Bob Hindson Racing shop in Kansas City, Missouri, to have new headers, exhaust and a tune installed, but the shop owner hit a building while out on a drive and totaled the prized Porsche.
The car’s owner, who posted about the mishap on Rennlist as Ccapx, asked to remain anonymous as a there hasn’t been an insurance settlement on the car yet. However, Rennlist members local to the area were able to piece together much of the story on his thread about the crash.
Per information posted on Rennlist, Bob Hindson Racing owner Aaron Holstrom was driving with a passenger in Ccapx’s car when he lost control of the rear end of the car and spun into oncoming traffic. The car then hopped the curb and hit a plumbing supply business, nose first.
Rennlist members say Holstrom had to have taken traction control off before the crash, given the skidmarks leading up to the building the car hit. They also knew that there had to be a passenger, otherwise, the passenger-side airbags wouldn’t have deployed.
Holstrom took responsibility for the crash afterwards in a phone call to Ccapx. Ccapx said that he actually started laughing when Holstrom called him about the car’s crash, thinking that it was so unbelievable, it had to be a joke. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
The front clip and hood were destroyed in the hit, and airbags on both sides of the car deployed in the process. The initial damage estimate was $75,000, with $150,000 in diminished value (pending no frame damage). Ccapx claims that comparable cars are worth $250,000 between $260,000, however, it likely won’t be the same as he personally ordered and spec’d the crashed car.
What’s particularly interesting—and a true testament to the sleuthing abilities of the internet—is the amount of information uncovered by the other members on Rennlist after just a few short posts on the crash.
One Rennlist poster, 991RACER, outed the name of the shop as Bob Hindson Racing before Ccapx posted it, much to several users’ surprise as it is one of the better regarded Porsche shops in Kansas City. Bob Hindson Racing had posted Ccapx’s car on Facebook before the crash (which has since been deleted), and 991RACER dropped a screenshot of the post into the thread.
Another Rennlist poster, Warehouse33.net, posted a photo of the car right after the accident taken by an eyewitness that he’d found on social media.
Worse yet, Warehouse33.net also found a Facebook conversation claiming that the car had been spotted launching from a stoplight earlier around 12:45 p.m., and thus, that the 4 p.m. crash wasn’t the only time the car had been driven recklessly on public roads. Later, he went to the scene and took several photos of the marks left on the building and the road at the scene of the crash, even spotting a few parts of Ccapx’s car still on the ground.
Ccapx since confirmed the details in that Facebook thread and learned that his GT3 RS wasn’t the first one to be hooned while at Holstrom’s shop, posting:
Yes, this went on for sometime over four hours, there are witnesses that saw the car in multiple places in Kansas City doing hard accelerations and letting the back end go. There is also security camera tape. The more I dig into this, the worse it gets. And no, this is not the first time he has ripped a customer car.
Ccapx said that he had used Bob Hindson Racing before for work on a Boxster Spyder, and that Fabspeed had even recommended this shop as the installer for the GT3 RS of theirs that Ccapx had purchased. A Fabspeed representative since apologized in the thread for what Ccapx is going through.
Jalopnik attempted to reach Bob Hindson Racing for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publishing. This post will be updated if we hear back from the shop.
While some may argue that a shop needs to test its work, it certainly shouldn’t be tested at full speed on public roads, and especially shouldn’t be done without express consent from the car’s owner.