13 hours Ago By Nicholas Maronese
Article content If you’re an Extremely Online car enthusiast like half of the Driving.ca staff are, you may have heard recently about how wrestler-turned-movie-star John Cena just took delivery of a knock-off Lamborghini Diablo he’d commissioned 20 years ago, before he was famous and could, y’know, afford several real Lamborghinis . What you might not have heard is that, after recently being handed the keys to that long-awaited kit car, he’s now selling the thing off on Bring A Trailer.
We’ll recap the story, as told by Cena on a recent episode of the Club Shay Shay podcast, real quick for you: in 2003, Cena was an up-and-coming entertainer in the WWE, who had yet to approach anything near the celebrity he enjoys these days. Tight on cash but big on aspirations, he commissioned a kit-car-style replica of a Lamborghini Diablo VT powered by a used BMW V12, as that was all he could reasonably afford at the time. “I didn’t want to spring for a Lamborghini, so I bought a fake one,” he told podcast host and well-known football player Shannon 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!’” Perusing the pics here, we have to agree—it looks pretty good. There are but a few tells, visually, that it’s not a real Diablo, at least if you’re not an expert. However, its build did not go “pretty good.
” Two years after its commissioning, when it was “finished,” Cena was handed over a car that basically didn’t run. So the project was bounced around from one shop to another—10 shops in total, at a cost equal to one-and-a-half times the real deal, jokes(?) the wrestler. Cena says on the podcast – filmed recently but on an unspecified date – that he just got the keys to the finished product last week .
That’s a 20-year wait for a fake Lambo with a fibreglass body and a V12 that sounds okay, but not at all like a Lamborghini powerplant. Well, now the wait is over, Cena can finally enjoy his—oh, no, that’s right, no, he’s selling the cursed thing as fast as possible on auction site Bring A Trailer . The auction ends tomorrow, and as I write this, bidding has hit US$80,000 (CDN$108,000).
We’re sure he’ll miss it dearly. It’s not the only replica that Cena is auctioning off on the site this weekend either. Later today, we’ll see the close of a much less dubious, much more impressive-looking replica of a 1966 Jaguar XJ13 , a somewhat obscure mid-’60s race car.
Only one real XJ13 was ever built, but this copy was nicely pulled off by Florida-based Predator Performance in the mid-2010s. Like the Lamborghini, the car sports a V12 backed by a five-speed and wears fibreglass bodywork. Like the Lambo, bidding hovers around the US$75,000 mark (CDN$101,600) as of writing.
Unlike the Lambo, replica Jaguar XJ13s can trade well into six-figure territory, though the quality of this particular build may be up for debate. At a glance, we’d still argue it’s the better of the pair leaving Cena’s garage to cross the block. John Cena is known worldwide as an actor, wrestler, and entertainer, but “car buff” shouldn’t be listed too far behind those other occupations.
The man’s commissioned several interesting custom cars, and dailies a newer Honda Civic Type R . Maybe his automotive-enthusiast bona fides will be bolstered by his being attached to a rumoured upcoming Matchbox toy-car-affiliated feature film. Look for news on that project when we hear something firmer about it—hopefully we won’t have to wait 20 years.
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