I am writing to you as a friend of VaGambler who was banned from the forum for some very stupid behavior. He was drunk one night and very mad at another RX-7 owner. So he started to spout off on the VaDriven forum. He realized that his behavior was wrong the next day and no one should take the rant seriously. Not even he would actually purposely run into another car at the track. The situation came about when Shawn blew up his engine on his RX-7, but did not have the money to rebuild it. Several RX-7 owners in the Newport News area donated parts and time to port and rebuild his engine so that he could race again. Kenny Rogers (VaGambler) was the one who donated the most parts since he had 4 RX-7’s that he had purchased to get extra parts for his own racecar. After being given parts for free the help out a friend, Shawn turned around and sold the rebuild engine to a guy in Maryland for $2,400 by telling the guy that the engine had all new parts in it and for had raced it twice with no break-in period. At the same time that the engine was being rebuilt for Shawn, Kenny found another good running RX-7 selling for $1500 and he gave the seller a $800 down payment. Because Kenny had a few cars at his house he asked if he could pick up the car at a later date in order to strip the parts cars at his house first. Shawn found out about the car Kenny was buying and that it was a Turbo2 with a stand-alone engine management system already in it making it worth twice the $1500 that Kenny was buying it for. Shawn took the $2400 that he got for selling the engine with Kenny’s parts in it and went to the seller’s house. Shawn told the seller that Kenny had changed his mind and was no longer interested in buying the car and that he would come by later to get his down payment back. At that point Shawn said that Kenny had told him about it in case he was interested in buying it, which he did for $1500. This was all a lie by Shawn to get the car, but the seller did not call Kenny to verify the story and he gave the title to Shawn. The next day when Kenny found out what had happened he called the seller ask about it and then went to Shawn and offered him $1800 to make things right. Shawn told him “You snooze, you loose” and refused the sell the car back to him. As you can see Kenny has a very good reason to be mad at Shawn and in fact the Hampton Roads RX-7 club has blacklisted Shawn for what he did. The person that bought the NEW rebuilt engine is also trying to get him money back from Shawn and has posted his horror story about his problems with Shawn on the www.rx7club.com forums as well.

Even though Kenny should not have gone on VaDriven and drunkenly threatened Shawn I hope that you can lift this ban since he really is a good guy that had a moment of bad judgment.