Getting robbed hurts. Getting a prized car stolen, well, that’s enough to set you into a deep rage that can be tough to recover from. Luckily for the owner of this BMW E36 M3 race car, the online car community stepped up to help. But it sounds like a window sticker is what really got the car home.
Alex Farrington is, apparently, a car enthusiast who likes to drive on racetracks. As such he had (and has again) a red M3 in an enclosed trailer parked by his office ready to go out on racing adventures.
He’s a decent storyteller too, so I’d suggest tuning in to the five minute video where he recounts the two months of troubles he had trying to get his car back. For those who can’t be bothered, I’ll recap:
One day Farrington looked to where the trailer was supposed to be, and... saw nothing.
He did what any of us would do: contacted the police, put himself on blast all over the internet, and shared the details of his vehicle everywhere he could.
Despite being shared thousands of times on Facebook and forums, Farrington never got a lead on what had happened to his car except for one false alarm in which another stolen race car-in-trailer got recovered.
Amazingly, months after having lost the car and trailer, Farrington got a phone call from a guy asking: “Did you lose a red BMW?”
Turned out, this guy had unwittingly bought Farrington’s stolen car when he purchased the stolen trailer from the thief off an online ad.
The kicker is, this person didn’t recognize the car from it having been posted all over the internet. Indeed, he thought he was just buying a cheap enclosed trailer. It seems that the accidental-stolen-property-recipient only figured out who owned the car because “A. Farrington” was sticker’d on the window, where race cars tend to have the names of their pilots.
After a few phone calls and Mr. Farrington forking a bunch of money over to the police to get his vehicles out of impound, he was basically made whole again after the long ordeal.
Hell of a story, with some important lessons: make sure your insurance covers your trailer and its contents even when it’s sitting parked, and be very skeptical when a free race car comes with your cheap trailer.