The idea that John Cena, one of the most famous people in the world, would buy a Lamborghini kit car is odd. Cena is wildly successful, having enjoyed long pro wrestling and acting careers, and could easily afford a real one (even if he often prefers Honda Civics). However, Cena spent 20 years and suffered countless setbacks getting a fake Lambo into running shape, and only recently took delivery of it.
On the Club Shay Shay show hosted by legendary NFL tight end Shannon Sharpe, Cena admits to the fake Lamborghini being his worst-ever purchase. “I didn’t want to spring for a Lamborghini, so I bought a fake one,” he told Sharpe. “This was 2003. I found a company that would do it, they put a V12 in it, I’m like ‘Man, it’s the same thing. It looks pretty good. It looks great!'”
That V12 was a BMW V12, likely from an 850CSi or 750iL. So it still likely wasn’t a cheap car to have built. More importantly, it wasn’t an easy car to get a hold of, even after it was done.
“They tried to stiff me out of the car, I had to ask some friends who knew how to find things to go and find things. I then had to get a title for the car, of which I did. The car finally shows up after two years of waiting, it doesn’t go into gear,” Cena said. “The motor was held together with the timing of two Chevy V6s, so everything is confused, nothing runs. The car is not roadworthy. So I sent it to a shop. This was 2005.”
All that sounds like a nightmare—two years of dealing with shady shops and mechanics trying to patchwork a likely used BMW V12 that doesn’t run into a Lamborghini kit car body. Surely, anyone dealing with such headaches would just cut their losses and put the botched experiment out of its misery. Not Cena, though.
“I just got the keys to that car a week ago,” Cena said, stunning Sharpe. “I’ve sent it to ten shops, finally found somebody to do it, they did it, tip-to-tail, and, I will tell you, it looks great.”
According to Cena, the entire cost of getting the kit car to run after 20 years of tinkering is roughly the same as one and a half new “roadsters.” Back in 2022, Sam Hard of Hard Up Garage said in an interview that Cena’s fake Lambo is a replica of a Diablo VT Roadster, painted yellow. According to J.D. Power, the Diablo VT Roadster’s original MSRP in 1997 was $273,000. Going by that original price, Cena’s spent somewhere in the region of $409,000 over two decades to get his knockoff on the road.
Today, Cena can laugh off the absurdity of spending so much money and time on a fake exotic, and he told Sharpe that the entire experience earned him some valuable life lessons. But I love that he stuck with it, whether out of sentiment or stubbornness, and continued to send his faux Diablo to various mechanics for two decades before finally getting that happy ending.
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