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Originally posted by JackOlsen
My gut reaction is that race car rental only makes sense with relatively disposable cars. $4-500 a day for a Miata is not a crazy amount of money, for newbie enthusiasts, and it's hard to do too much damage in/with/to a Miata. Anyone with a reasonable amount of track experience should be able to drive the car at what feels like 9/10 all day and still not be in a dangerous place.
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Exactly. Write off a spec Miata and you're talking 10 grand. Wrinkle a fender and you're talking a hundred or two.
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Out here, you can rent a new-generation Viper for $900, but you've got to pretty much sign over the deed for your house in order to get it out the door, liability-wise. I'd think you'd have to price a daily 911 rental in the $600-700 range, to be reasonable, and it's hard for me to imagine the income from that being worth the risks.
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I've rented a Ferrari and the insurance issue was not that big a deal. My car insurance basically covered me because it's a street car. The rental agency offered supplemental coverage for the holes in my policy and it was well worth the $100 a day for it, imo.
If you rent that Porsche, you'll probably have to eat any mechanical damage short of an obvious over-rev. Suppose the renter comes back complaining of tranny noise and balky shifting? How can you prove it was caused by his crappy shifting?
Insurance is a must. You have to find a provider and offer it to the renter in lieu of a huge deposit. If the guy has 60 grand lying around you shouldn't force him to buy the insurance. You need to find the insurer so he doesn't have to go out and find it, but also to be sure a renter doesn't come in with some fly-by-night policy. Regardless of the renter's good intentions at the beginning, if some guy punts him in the rear and send him into a wall, or somebody oils down the track in front of him and he writes the car off, he's not going to be in the mood to buy the car. Then there's the question of mechanical damage. I don't know if anyone sells mechanical insurance, but imagine the guy does screw up and over-revs it. Not many people will just write you a check when you tell them it's 16 grand for an engine rebuild for a car they don't own.
As for how much to charge, forget about 10% of the value. Who's going to rent a car for 6 grand for a weekend? You can pick up a pro race weekend for not much more than that. Just because the car may be worth 6 times what a spec Miata is worth doesn't mean people would pay 6 times the rental.