As a former Level 5 Motorsports employee so neatly said in an interview with Road & Track, “I think it just comes down to fast money, fast cars, fast women, and all the trappings you’d expect to see someone get caught up with.”
Buckle up tight, readers, this is going to be a bumpy ride with car racing’s most successful privately owned team, wins at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, and a podium at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
There’s also five Ferraris, a million-dollar Porsche, a less expensive Porsche, five race cars, 350 lots of spares, 782 per cent interest rates, Native American tribes, an $18 million Learjet, an $11m Aspen home and two Cervelo S5 road bicycles with indoor trainers and millions of struggling, everyday American people allegedly charged illegally high interest rates, the FBI and $2 billion fines.
So, all in all, a model for your correspondent and the other owners of the wildly unsuccessful Weekend Australian Racing Team (WART) then.
Enter Scott Tucker, the superman of car racing this decade. Scott started racing at 44. It appeared he had made his money in private equity. “What I’ve tried to do is cram about 20 years of racing into this last six,” Scott told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, five years ago, at a time when he was very happy to talk to the media.
It only took Scott a year from his first race in a Subaru to his first win in a Ferrari. It only took him four years to hit the big time in sport where drivers spend 20 years to get a seat in a serious car in serious races like Le Mans and Daytona. He hired drivers like Australia’s Ryan Briscoe, France’s Sebastien Bourdais and Portugal’s Joao Barbosa. He spent a lot of money on building one of the best set up private racing teams in the world. A lot of money.
According to a criminal indictment, US v. Tucker and Muir, Scott “spent over $130m … on lavish personal expenses including race cars (and) the professional auto racing team.”
As motorsport.com wrote: “Arguably for a two-year period, no driver competed in as many different cars, at as many different tracks, at venues all around the globe. In 2009 he raced in, and won, the SCCA Runoffs. The next year, he raced an Audi R10 TDi at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The next year he won a Trans-Am race. The width and breadth of the racing experience Scott Tucker had assembled in a very short time was unparalleled”.
Then in 2011, Scott started to retreat.
A joint investigation from the Centre for Public Integrity and CBS News reported: “What Tucker doesn’t publicise: he is an ex-convict who runs a controversial business that regulators in at least five states have tried to shut down for violating their laws. Hiding behind a labyrinth of shell companies and operating from the ether of the internet, Tucker’s businesses make payday loans over the web even in states where they are outlawed.
He offers quick cash to people desperate enough to borrow money from a faceless website, even signing over access to their bank account to total strangers. And he charges nearly 800 per cent interest on loans that take months to pay off”.
Scott is a great example of innovation in business. He “partnered with a number of small Indian tribes to provide his payday lending business with the cloak of tribal sovereign immunity. Under federal law, tribes are equal to states as sovereign powers. So they are immune from being sued in state court. Critics call the tactic “rent-a-tribe”.
Scott has always had an interest in cars. In April 1988, according to the Centre for Public Integrity, at the age of 26, he borrowed $US50,000 from American Bank of Kansas City, offering a new Porsche as collateral. Court records show that Tucker lied on the application; he had sold the sports car months earlier. Ten years later he and his brother Blaine started a payday lending business.
It wasn’t long before his new businesses came to the attention of state authorities and the Feds.
Despite the issues, Scott’s PR machine kept spinning: “A real-life action figure can be found working his magic at racetracks all over the world. With all of his recent success, fans of the three-time champion may have a hard time picturing Tucker in anything other than a driver’s suit, but he was a successful businessman long before he was a race-car driver. Give that man a cape.”
In February 2016, the Manhattan US Attorney’s office charged Scott and his lawyer with violations of the Truth in Lending Act and the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organisations Act and running an illegal loan business that generated more than $3bn in revenue between 2003 and 2012. The Federal Trade Commission had also been investigating Scott for several years and asked a Nevada federal judge in January to order him to pay $1.7bn in damages owed to borrowers overcharged by his payday-lending companies.
This is how we got to next month’s Auctions America thrilling series of modern race cars and assorted equipment at Indiana’s historic Auburn Auction Park. Having seen the estimates and knowing the Feds will take any dollars that come their way, if you are into motorsport, payday lending and a luxury lifestyle you have to be there with me.
This is a shortened version of the original article – read the rest at The Australian
