Wallace Labs Imports the Rarest and Most Extreme Cars on Earth
Raphael Orlove
Here in America, you can’t just buy a Gordon Murray T.50 and drive it, not even for its $3.2 million asking price. The company never tested and certified them for sale in the United States. And yet I’m staring right at one in a nondescript warehouse in Houston. There are only three places like this in the country, and if you weren’t into the very highest of high-end automobiles, you’d never know it existed.
Wallace Environmental Testing, Inc. doesn’t exactly sound like it would be a home for the rarest and most exceptional cars this country has ever seen. Behind its unmarked doors are supercars that were never sold here, that never would be here without Wallace’s hard work. The company’s old photo collage, pulled out of a storage closet for this interview, is so packed with forbidden fruit that it’s hard to focus on any one car. There’s a Porsche 959 pasted over a Porsche 911 GT1 pasted over another two 959s. I lose track of the Stirling Moss SLR McLarens against a Morgan Aeromax. It’s easy to miss one of the McLaren F1s Wallace brought over, the cut-out almost wedged into a corner. There’s a great photo of founder Bill Wallace himself upside down in an imported Ferrari F50 and another of his successor Les Weaver elbow deep in a Ferrari 288 GTO.
Weaver runs this place now, with the same long hair and the same kind expression he had when it opened in the early ‘80s. He’s been here since the beginning. That means going from the bad old days of the grey market boom, when anybody could import a car and get it certified. Lots of fly-by-night import shops sprang up, happy to rubber-stamp any Mercedes with a catalytic converter haphazardly welded under the floorboards. That was before the government cracked down in ‘88 with legislation nicknamed the “25 Year Rule.”
If you want to import a vintage car – that is, anything that’s 25 years old and older – that’s fine. Anybody can make that happen, and for about a thousand bucks, a shop like Inbound Motorsports can bring over whatever Renault 5 Turbo or Nissan Skyline GT-R you desire. If you want to bring over a new car that wasn’t sold in America, that can only be done by what’s called a Registered Importer, a shop that is registered and regulated by the federal government. Autosport Designs in Long Island is a great one, for example. But for complete compliance, that imported new car has to be brought up to all our relevant safety and emissions standards. That work can only be done by an Independent Commercial Importer, or ICI. An ICI is essentially a Registered Importer with an emissions lab, and there are only three of them in the entire country. There’s JK Technologies on the East Coast, there’s G & K on the West Coast, and in the middle is Wallace.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Wallace will do the work on whatever car comes its way, but high costs mean that it’s usually prohibitively expensive for all but the most expensive cars and the most well-heeled owners. Certification takes a lot of expertise, and it takes a lot of time. A bill for a major project could easily run into the six figures, and Weaver encourages owners to pool together to spread things out. He just finished work on about 40 Aston Martin Valkyries the other week. At somewhere between $2 and $4 million per car, that could have been $100 million of cars passing through this shop on a quiet industrial side street.
A bank of instruments takes up an entire wall of the office, and there’s a dyno out in the main shop area. Beyond it sit two huge, car-sized sealed containers for precise measurement of exhaust gases and particulates. It’s a lot of machinery, but Weaver tells me that even he doesn’t have the equipment for some of the EPA’s more obscure tests. The Gordon-Murray T.50 in the shop, for instance, just got back from Roush up in Michigan. Anybody needing high-altitude testing done, for instance, is probably ringing up Roush, and that includes major manufacturers.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove The cars in this building aren’t from automakers. Weaver deals directly with owners and owners alone. The expensive stuff in here is coming through a carveout in our Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards nicknamed “Show and Display,” which lets in cars that weren’t sold here for show and display purposes, so long as they’re low-volume vehicles (under 500 units built), they’re of technological or historical significance, and they stick to 2,500 miles a year. What counts as a significant vehicle? You have to petition the government for approval. Since this is all regulated by the government, everything’s public. Here’s where you can find the list of what’s eligible at the moment. Here’s what’s not. See the Koenigsegg CCR on that first list? Here it is at Wallace Labs.
“This will be the first and only CCR in the U.S.,” the owner (who wishes to remain unnamed) explains in an interview over the phone. Koenigsegg only built 14 CCRs, and this is number 3. It’s the car that Koenigsegg put on display at the 2004 Geneva Motor Show. The collector bought the car at auction in Milan and brought it in under Show and Display. Wallace is handling all the testing and modifications required to comply with all the relevant safety and emissions standards. “He’s one of just very few folks who do that kind of service,” the collector says. “We’d gotten his name from another collector, if you will, and he said he’d done a really good job.”
Weaver complains that dealing with the DOT and EPA can be more difficult than anything else. Federal regulations state that any car from a foreign market can be imported into the United States if it’s fundamentally the same as one that was sold here new. All Wallace has to do is bring all the little market-specific things into compliance. Move a few side marker reflectors, make sure the headlights are U.S. spec, that kind of thing. But the government still has to review these applications. According to Weaver, new approvals have stopped cold. Cars can get lost in this bureaucratic dead zone. If you’re an Aston Martin Valkyrie owner, that might not be the hardest thing to rectify. You probably golf with a senator or two. The owner of the 1997 Jeep Wrangler, which has been waiting on a resubmitted petition since 2020, is less lucky. It’s the same deal with the 2013 Land Rover awaiting government approval, and a made-in-China trailer you can buy on Alibaba stranded here in Houston.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Sometimes the difficulty of getting a car certified is just a question of sourcing a particularly expensive or esoteric part. I notice a 997-generation Porsche Sport Classic hanging out in the corner of the shop. Only 250 were ever built. “It was never sold here,” says Weaver, “but the engine was sold here in another Porsche. Same exhaust system, same OBD system, same vapor control system, it’s all identical to a U.S. version.” It just needs little things, but those little things can get challenging. “This Porsche out here,” Weaver explains, “you got to change the gas tank, and the vapor lines, add that pressure monitor to the tank, and a bunch of valves and lines and crap, and wiring to the ECU, reprogram the software… you know, it’s a job!” One particular U.S.-complaint part for the fuel system might not be expensive, but nobody has one. These kinds of things aren’t exactly sitting on the shelf at your local Autozone. Weaver often has to call around to dealers, who then call back to the automaker, which may even call back to the manufacturer of the part to get one made.
And those are the easy cars. Weaver laughs thinking back to getting Porsche 959s into compliance. The hard part, as Weaver puts it, was “getting the daggum thing to be in closed loop.” The software needed reprogramming to meet EPA standards. “That meant taking the computer apart and pulling chips out of it. You know, put it into a programmer, write the code, and program it back into the chip and put it back on the board.” Getting new code to fit with such little storage space was a challenge, but he made it work, just like he made it work figuring out what kind of catalytic converter would work with the engine within the tight confines of the car.
It was the same story with a set of Pagani Zondas he brought in, which were nowhere close to meeting our emissions standards. It’s incredible to hear Weaver talk about these cars so comfortably and casually. I’m not sure if anyone knows them as well as he does. “You’ve got an old ME 1.0,” he says of the car’s computer brain. “ME 2.0 is when they went to OBD,” which is what the EPA requires. “We were concerned about the amount of memory that was available in the chips, but we were finally able to get the software with full OBD capability. And then, it came to the exhaust.” Never sold in the U.S., there is no off-the-shelf, U.S.-compliant exhaust Wallace could buy. He had to engineer one, and that involved a lot of trial-and-error.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “I bought different catalytic converters, different sizes, different flow,” recalls Weaver. “That Pagani Zonda got a lot of power. You can’t put a catalyst that’s 300 cells; it’s gonna create too much back pressure. You’ve got to have a performance catalyst that’s got good flow through it. Well, good flow means it’s not gonna work that well. So you’ve got to have the pre-cat up there close enough to light off and start killing it, and then you’ve got another catalyst further back that’s big, so it’s got enough volume for the exhaust gases to go through it. So you’re cutting that cat off and putting that other one on. Well, that didn’t work, lemme try this cat, let’s try this arrangement, and let’s redo the whole exhaust arrangement. And once we’ve got it where, OK, it’s passing close, but we need thicker pipe tubing to hold the heat in, and ceramic coating, too. Now we’ve got to find someone to make us a header.” Weaver rattles this all off from memory, intimately familiar with one of the rarest and most desirable cars on the planet.
“As per usual, it comes down to a customer who knows people over there, who’s Italian, like Giuseppe Risi,” says Weaver. Risi is the biggest name for Ferrari in America, with a dealership authorized by Enzo himself and a race team with multiple class wins at Le Mans and Daytona. “He knows these people, and I know him. He can pick up the phone and make a phone call to somebody over in Italy who manufactures exhaust systems for Ferrari, and they’re willing to work with him. Now, if I tried to get a hold of them? To make me five headers? Five sets? They’d laugh me out!” Weaver tells me. “But when Giuseppe calls them, and asks them to do it, they do it.”
I ask him about the Gordon Murray T.50 in the shop, with its orange rubber tubes on the exhausts to hook it up to his dyno equipment. This is a $3 million car, with a central driving position like Gordon Murray’s McLaren F1 before it. And like the F1, the T.50 isn’t designed to be the fastest car on the planet, but the most rewarding. Its 3,994-cc V12 has a hair-trigger response, and it’s hooked up to a manual transmission. I peek under the car while it’s up on the lift, and I must be one of the only people outside of the company to see its triple-plate carbon and titanium clutch. It’s tiny. It looks like something out of a motorcycle.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Weaver’s summation of the T.50 is terse. “A lot of power in not a lot of car,” he says. “Hard to drive it on the dyno. As soon as you move the throttle an eighth of an inch the damn thing wants to take off.”
He’s speaking practically. The first moments of an EPA emissions test can be the hardest. “The first 30 seconds is everything. You will fail the entire test in 30 seconds. I mean, the car can emit zero emissions after that and fail. If that catalytic converter doesn’t light off and clean up, and you don’t have control of the fuel mixture and timing during that first 30 seconds of operation… because, you push it on that dyno, you start it up, 20 seconds later you accelerate,” says Weaver, explaining the scientific procedure for EPA testing.
He continues that “these are hard cars to drive. You miss a shift? Fail. If you over-rev it, or make it stumble a little, you’re done. Test over.” These are low-volume cars that not only need delicate control over sensitive clutches, but also need to be in perfect running condition. “The driver’s got to hit it just right, and the car’s gotta start… click it and woooooooo. Any of this bub-bub-bub-bub?” he says, imitating a cold motor with a lumpy cam. “It’s over.”
As he tells these stories, I can’t help but notice a hint of a grin creeping onto Weaver’s face. I ask him if he finds these huge logistical challenges fun. “For me it is,” he smiles. “Because I like cars. It’s all enjoyable to me.”
