Making money and enemies flipping GT-Rs

and then I went back and drove mine I'm like this thing's crazy so in the Nissan GTR finally dropped on us Shores in July of 2008 it was a wildly anticipated car there was a lot of rumors about it it had set an incredible Nurburgring lap time which many people did not believe and tried to disprove because they thought at the time how could a car of that weight possibly make it around the track that fast now that was at the height of my car flipping days and I had lots and lots of orders of Nissan GTR s so I was fortunate enough to get a number of the first ones in the country and of course sold them for exorbitant markups not because I was greedy but because other people were willing to pay it so miracle how capitalism works I got one in that was actually a base model everybody wanted the premium model everybody thought they had to have that extra option but I got one in that had the it was the base model and I ended up keeping it for a while and the longer I kept it the less I wanted to sell it and it became clear quite quickly that these cars were everything that Nissan had purported them to be fall of 2008 was when I opened my dealership in Las Vegas is the world's first destination dealership it was a dealership as part of a Motorsports ranch on a racetrack it certainly gave for great experience with a number of cars some incredible people and certainly gave me a lot of track time and really came to master not only the Spring Mountain track but the Nissan GTR and I ended up running in the redline Time Attack series and thanks to my buddy Peter Medina over at synapse engineering they sponsored me and built some parts for the GTR so it became their development test mule and that car was unstoppable so one of the first kind of events that we did was actually after redline time attack they had a gt-r track day just kind of out of the blue maybe it wasn't out of the blue but it was out of the blue to me some people asked me to stay around and hey you should bring your GTR to this event so I whatever got in a hotel for another night and stuck around and it was a lot of fun being out on track with all manner of modified and stock GTRs and we had a blast and that's where I ended up meeting Matt Farah of then garage 419 and we had our infamous pickup truck race around Buttonwillow some video production company I think it was Craig Lieberman and some other people put together this staged race and they had a number of fairly well-known GTRs including James Chen's yellow GTR with all the goodies on it and at the last minute they said hello hey why don't you join the mix too because you run the time attack and you know synapse modified to your car so we'll stick you in back what they didn't tell us is they wanted the race to be kind of close because it was really for more video production purposes but there is also I think a pro driver in there or somebody who was being groomed to be a pro driver or something like that the Mexican Stig in me couldn't handle just starting at the back so in about I think a lap and a half I had passed the whole field and decided to walk away with it not understanding the premise of the video so sure enough I want it by I don't know a significant margin but nobody cared because they were trying to make a video that was exciting so whatever now the base car came with Dunlop's the Premium Package came with Bridgestone's which were like the tires pacifically designed for that car and I came to find out that the reason that Nissan set such a blistering time was they used a base car with the Dunlop's because the Bridgestone's understeer like crazy and made a lot of noise and just in general were very good on that car and the Dunlop's were a night and day difference the crazy thing was too is I actually think I a ringer the engines were hand-built so there was obviously some variance in the power that each one was putting out but mine was significantly faster than any other car I drove and I remember taking a guy on a test drive in a different one and trying to illustrate how fast the car was and I got on it and he goes my Porsche Turbo is faster and I remember thinking like yeah you're right this one feels slow and then I went back and drove mine I'm like this thing's crazy so there certainly were ringer cars and I think the one that ran the ring was you know not intentionally but it was probably built on the same day that mine was built on because it was just that much better so the funny thing is is I heard rumors later on about this Porsche track day and somebody was telling me about this GTR that was running around this Porsche track day and you know beating everybody not that it's a race but everybody's got their egos to protect I was like yeah I I remember that car and so the the rumors that came back to me was that it was a highly prepped 600 horsepower GTR and I'm like was it black like yeah it's like yeah no that was mine it was stock and that was the one that was on all season tires - no no no no everybody said it was 600 horsepower I'm like yeah no you guys just have to make up excuses for a GTR being faster than your Porsches before the GTR had officially been released Nissan was talking about how it's going to be impossible to crack the ECU and nobody could tune it so of course immediately everybody tuned it and did all sorts of stuff to it I think Nissan was just posturing as a means of marketing because it built the hype that much more and laid a challenge out for the tuners to try to crack the impossible ECU which was not difficult at all so I hear Top Gear magazine had contacted some people looking for a place and a group of GTR owners to host this like tuner GTR shootout type thing and I was at Spring Mountain so I said hey let's host it here we can have a track day and they said great absol we're in so we assembled I don't know he must have had 25 GTRs there of all color shape and size and it was a fantastic time and really was just driving around the track they were interviewing people taking pictures of the car stuff like that it was just an absolute hoot I was cruising around the paddock in my diesel truck and one of the tuners I think it was Cobb was there and they were handing out t-shirts to everybody and so I pulled up in my truck I'm like hey sweet can I got a t-shirt and the guy gets all snotty and he's like no these are only for GTR owners and somebody standing right there who knew me was like I really think you should give him a shirt I think it's a good idea so I got a crack out of that and the interesting thing was is I dominated the market when they were new but once they became pre-owned I got out of the market quite quickly because the margins on GTRs then and even now it became like Corvettes it was like wholesale was 69 grand and retail was 70 I don't know why that is but I transitioned out of it quite quickly because there's just no money to be made there so I obviously got some interesting feedback from offering these cars at over sticker even though you know that's what market was willing to pay I mean the first ones coming in people were paying me almost $100,000 I I think my first one I may have sold for over a hundred thousand dollars and sticker at the time was I think 72 for a premium package and this was all from people coming to me offering to pay the price but then I'd also sent out an email blast to anybody who had expressed interest in a GTR and said hey we've got an extra allocation here's the price but a guy emailed me back and I actually posted his email on my Wall of shame on my website which gets great feedback and he said lol go F yourself maybe them your mother will pay the price you ask and he bragged about how he got his for only 1500 / sticker I was like okay well there's some feedback I looked up who he was and he's actually a professional poker player and I ended up meeting him about a year later one of these GTR events at the track and I of course remembered who he was I don't know if he did or not but he ended up being a super nice guy in person as is often the case it's easy to hide behind the supposed anonymity of the Internet so despite putting almost nine thousand very hard miles on my GTR most of them track miles and enjoying every bit of it after I sold it and after I kind of got out of the GTR game I realized that I didn't miss the cars at all they were incredibly capable they were certainly a revolutionary but if we use the Top Gear Italian car swear words it didn't have soul and passion and I like cars with soul and passion because they give you an overall more pleasurable driving experience and of course in business in general as they say adapt or die and as the GTR fad died out I had to get back into what I am good at and what is going to keep the business in the long run which is just simply building relationships and buying and selling good cars over and over again for customers to enjoy them a dollar shave club we always in control simply choose the delivery dates and frequency that suits your schedule so you don't run out get a shave shower with oral care starter set for just five bucks at dollarshaveclub.com [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 591,086

Keywords: Doug Tabbutt, Switchcars, Nissan, GT-R, GTR, modifications, Spring Mountain, Motorsports Ranch, Nevada, Las Vegas, Redline Time Attack, Synapse Engineering., Exhaust, Best, Track Day, Top Gear, Matt Farrah, James Chen, Cobb, Tuning, F250, Garage 419, VINwiki, Car Stories, AMS, Performance, Tires, Bridgestone, Doug Demuro, Dunlop, Porsche, Mexican Stig, video, car dealer, car flipper, allocation, dealer, ringer, nurburgring, lap time, wholesale, retail, Premium, Flip

Id: 0sdPpl7oh_g

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019