This New York dealer can import almost any car on earth

AutoSport is a factory-autorized lotus dealer and works with the DOT and the EPA to take over even the most limited task of the car manufacturer. “We are currently there. We are still waiting to test the vehicle yourself. You have all the necessary documentation. […] But they started the process months and months … probably a year and a half ago. “

The registered importer requirements have two restrictions. The first is that you can handle registered importers as a whole if the vehicle in question is from 25 or older. This is a product of the “25-year rule”, the above change of our federal safety standards from 1988. The second is that the rarest and most valuable cars can arrive under two conditions in the USA. You still have to go through a registered importer and stay up to 2,500 miles a year – basically on car shows or race tracks and back. This is referred to as the “Show and Display” rule, a change from 1999, which was set up so that Bill Gates implemented his Porsche 959. (The US -TOAL confiscated the 959 Gate for 13 years, while he and his friends campaigned for legislation.)

Show and display are one of the specialties of car sports. I can't help but notice an Aston One-77 that picks me from the edge of the car park from AutoSport. It shouldn't be here. Aston never sold the one-77 in the states because it did not meet all of our automotive standards. With a limited production run of 77 cars, Aston did not need the American market and did not bother to certify. Among all the one-77 who brought car sports with them, this is the owner and founder Tom Papadopoulo's personal car. It has achieved some ingenuity.

“I should have been buying a Honda franchise,” says Papadopoulos when he got through the front door. His walk to his office takes him on a Mercedes Slr McLaren Roadster, a Jaguar XJ220, a Bugatti Veyron and a 1954 Ferrari 250 GT racing car, one of four lightweights, two of which have survived to this day. “Price on request” is what you say on the dashboard, but the first two could easily separate you from half a million dollars. The latter two are seven -digit machines. You do not leave the exhibition room with this Ferrari for less than five million.

“We brought the one-77 for Aston,” clarifies Papadopoulos, “I brought a few shit for Aston because we were always asked to do what they could not do in the United States because we are still the colonies for them.” After carport designs have also taken over the V600 Le Mans and DB7 Zagato on Show and Display, you can enter the American market as a bridge for smaller car manufacturers. Papadopoulos has the easy touch of a local New York and explains that cars can be held in limited production for apparently nonsensical reasons for American sales. According to Papadopoulos, all of our test standards were passed, but was blocked because it was not OBD, the diagnostic standard that is also used to identify a car in countries that use barcodes for registration. Some piggyback software (and a few hundred pages documentation), and it was good to go. These hold-ups can “get like a bad DMV office”, as Papadopoulos puts it.

For each of his murmurs that he wanted that he had a Honda franchise, Papadopoulos knows this business from the front. He is deeply involved in purchases and sales, and I watch how he discusses with a customer what vintage -Porsche would be right for his kind of driving and lifestyle. And I do not mean in general – Papadopoulos goes through a mental list to the serial number and knows which RSR of the 1970s is real and which is a replica that contains the specification of the engine, which has been rejected in which year. He knows these cars, their stories and their owners personally. Some of them drove in the American Le Mans series or the Ferrari Challenge.

These are long relationships with both owners and their cars. Papadopoulos often buys back cars when they mix around their car wardrobe in the cartow. Autosport designs is very his company, which has been on connections since it was founded in 1989 and previously.

Ultimately, vintage cars make up the lion's share of the business of Autosport design. There are well over a hundred cars on the site, some desirable and rare. One even trudges me: It is a Sbarro Testa Rossa “Baby”, a racing car in the 1980s for children. Vintage cars not only let him get through a zariforized storm, but also convey a feeling for the ethos of importing the carport design. It is only a means to an end to get a way to get the car that the customer wants, regardless of the price wherever it may be.