PROUDFOOT: What's In A VIN?

GRAND-AM

PROUDFOOT: What’s In A VIN?

Vehicle identification numbers (VINs) are the DNA of automobiles and racing cars, but what do the characters mean?

Sylvia Proudfoot | Posted January 04, 2011 Calgary (CDN)

Porsche's new Rolex GT racer has a long and elaborate VIN that takes a bit of decrypting to understand. (Porsche)

Vehicle identification numbers (VINs) are the DNA of automobiles. Track a race car's VIN and you'll learn when and where it was built, how it's equipped, where it raced, even who drove it in a private test.

János Wimpffen, author of Time and Two Seats, meticulously researches and records the minutiae that together create a vehicle's history and determine its market value.

"The provenance of the car is very valuable. The value, of course, is who has driven it, what it's done," he said, noting accurate information can increase a race car's worth by millions of dollars.

Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series VINs are stamped into the chassis metal in one of two formats. Manufacturers like Ferrari and Porsche use the same 17-digit international standard for GT race cars and passenger vehicles. Daytona Prototype and tube-frame GT car builders use shorter number sequences.

To decode the VIN on a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car – for example, WP0ZZZ99ZBS798111 – start with W, the country code for Germany. P0 represents Porsche, ZZZ99 details body style and features, Z is a check digit, B is the model year 2011, S is made in Stuttgart, 798 identifies a 997-model Cup car, 111 is the chassis number. Model years are shown as single numbers for 2001 to 2009 and letters starting in 2010, so if the chassis was built in 2008, the B would change to 8.

Most current Daytona Prototype chassis are manufactured by Riley Technologies, headed by Bob and Bill Riley. The cars are identified as MkXI or MkXX, continuing the designation introduced by Riley & Scott Inc., which was co-owned by Mark (hence the Mk) Scott. So Riley MkXX-005 would be the fifth Riley DP, built to MkXX specifications. The same Mk moniker applies to Mazda GT cars, built as MkXV and MkXXIV models.

János Wimpffen. (Author)

Other manufacturer numbers are easier to decipher. For example, a Chevrolet Camaro PMGAGT-002 would be Pratt & Miller's second chassis built for Grand-Am GT competition. A Dallara DP-05 would be the fifth Daytona Prototype built by Dallara.

So what if a car crashes and the chassis is beyond repair? Or it's built from bits of other cars?

Wimpffen and Grand-Am technical manager Rob Elson agree: A new tub makes it a different car and that requires a new VIN. Rolex Series teams are allowed only three chassis per year, so the officials carefully check to make sure no one gains an unfair advantage by building multiple chassis customized for different tracks. Elson noted it's tough to disguise a VIN transfer.

"If you've taken that part of the firewall that has the VIN on it and tried to cut it out of one car and put it into another to retain the VIN, it's going to be very difficult to do that without it showing somewhere. To stamp those numbers into a new chassis is very difficult because some of the numbers and letters have specific irregular shapes," he explained.

"If a manufacturer or a team doesn't have a VIN, we have some Grand-Am identification numbers we put on them so we know which car is being run. It's an adhesive-backed foil sticker and if you try to take it off, it says VOID underneath it."

Updates are allowed, with some limitations.

"Obviously, you're not going to turn an E-36 BMW into an E-92 brand-new car, but the VIN in terms of model year only matters for the current year," Elson said. "We don't let you update a 2008 car to be a current-year car, but we would let you update a 2008 to be a 2009 or 2010 car."

Wimpffen admits rebuilds, replacement parts and sometimes-sketchy documentation make it "fiendishly complicated" to track VINs, but he relishes the challenge.

"To me and to most people who track histories of these things, the chassis of the car – in the road-going car it might be the unibody unit around which the car is built; in terms of a prototype, it's usually a carbon-fibre tub around which everything is built – however you define that internal unit, that to me is what defines the car as a car. It's kind of like, what is it that makes you different than the next person? There's a skeletal structure that you have; you could transplant kidneys, heart, liver and everything else, but deep down, you're still you. The chassis is what defines one car from another car. You can update it all you want, you can swap engines, but that chassis stays with the car.

"If the chassis has stayed the same, even if it's been banged-about, bent and pushed back together again, you can still argue that's the same car. That's why I do this kind of thing, because that chassis number has history. Some time in the future, that number has value."

Sylvia Proudfoot has seen motorsport from many vantage points. She's worked as a reporter, series media officer, entrant, driver manager, team strategist, event coordinator, logistics administrator and sponsor rep. With stints in open-wheel, stock-car and sports-car racing, she's equally at home at le Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Daytona International Speedway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Nürburgring. Her life before racing spanned political and corporate work, automotive consulting and sports projects including golf, hockey, pro rodeo and the Olympic Games.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvia Proudfoot

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