Aftermarket shop Kies Motorsports invested five years and a whopping $175,000 to build this wicked BMW M3 (F80) project car. When it came time to say goodbye to the super sedan, the New Jersey-based company had it on the market for less than half that, at $75,000. That sounds like a screaming deal, right? The person who ‘bought’ the car must have thought so too.
However, four days after the transaction took place, things went wrong. Although the bank verified the check before the car changed hands, the money was ultimately withdrawn from the seller’s account. It turned out that the cashier’s check was counterfeit. As a result, Kies Motorsports CEO Bryan Kiefer found himself in quite a sticky situation as he was left without money and a car.
Bryan gave the buyer the benefit of the doubt and called him to ask him to return the car. Predictably, he didn’t show up at the arranged meeting. Then the police were called in to deal with what was at the time a fraud and theft. The officer contacted the individual calling himself John Clay Facebook and asked him to leave the car with the keys in it at an exit on the New Jersey Turnpike. The “buyer” had to text Bryan with the address of the car and then be done with it, without any legal consequences. Again he didn’t show up.
The tricked-out M3 with four-figure horsepower was probably in Long Island at the time, but this is where the story gets really interesting. An alleged accomplice texted Ryan to tell him he was driving the car from Virginia back to New Jersey to drop it off. Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. That’s when Kies Motorsports decided to record the above video and enlist the community’s help to find the car.
Fortunately, there is a happy ending. A follow-up video has been posted below Instagram shows that the M3 is once again at Kies Motorsports. The identities of those who helped the store recover the car have not been released for privacy reasons. Ryan says they found it at a “dark address with the car on the side of a building. Very sketchy.”
As for the car itself, the F80 is painted in a Ferrari-esque Individual Rosso Corsa and has a carbon fiber roof. The fully built engine has a monstrous 1,001 horsepower at the wheels and delivers a torque of 1,097 Newton meters. It is a 2016 model year with 65,000 miles (104,607 kilometers) on the odometer. However, the engine only has about 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) left after receiving a new block, forged pistons, forged rods and other upgrades.