Importing a Race Car from France: What It Takes

We have just taken delivery of a Nova Proto NP01 from France — a turbocharged K20 car, which is not something the factory NP01 normally comes as. More on the car itself in a separate piece.

This one is about the part nobody writes up: what it actually takes to get a race car from a French constructor onto a trailer in California. We had done plenty of parts imports before this. A whole car is a different animal, and a few things surprised us.

You are dealing with four organisations, not one

The first thing worth understanding is that "buying a car from France" is not one transaction. There is a chain, and every link can stall the whole thing:

• The constructor — Nova Proto, who build the car and generate the commercial invoice and export paperwork.
• The US agent — for us, Jonothan Benefield at Aurora Motorsports. He handles the relationship with the factory, the spec, and a great deal of chasing.
• The freight forwarder — who books the container, tracks the vessel and tells you when reality has diverged from the plan.
• The customs broker — a separate company again, who files the entry and needs you to have given them legal authority to act for you.

Going through an agent rather than direct to the factory costs something. It also means somebody whose job it is to know this process is making the phone calls, in the right time zone, in the right language. On a first import that is worth paying for.

The paperwork happens before anything moves

Before a broker can file anything on your behalf, you have to give them a power of attorney. Ours went through the broker's online portal and needed:

• A power of attorney form
• A passport — or, without one, two forms of photo ID
• A letter from the IRS confirming the company's EIN, or a Social Security card. Any IRS letter showing the name and EIN works.

None of that is difficult. All of it takes longer than you expect, because it involves finding documents you have not looked at in years, and because the car is on the water while you look.

Start the POA the moment the car is paid for, not when it sails. It is the single easiest thing to do early and the most annoying thing to be doing late.

The name on the invoice has to match everything else

This is the practical lesson worth the whole article.

The importer of record on the commercial invoice has to match the name on the power of attorney and the name on the tax documentation — exactly. Ours did not. The invoice had been raised against one of our business names, and the POA and W-9 carried another.

It is a trivial discrepancy in human terms. To customs it is two different importers, and it has to be corrected before the entry can be filed. We had the factory reissue the commercial invoice so that every document said the same thing.

Caught early, it is an email. Caught with the container on the dock, it is storage fees. If you take one thing from this: before the car ships, put the invoice, the POA and your tax paperwork side by side and read the name on all three.

Ocean freight runs on somebody else's schedule

Our container was booked on one vessel and then moved to another, because the original was overbooked. We found out by email from the forwarder, along with a new ETD and ETA.

That is normal. It is not a failure by anybody in the chain, and there is nothing to be done about it. Our dock date moved by several days, which then moved the customs clearance, which then moved the day we could go and collect the car.

Plan the schedule with slack in it. If you are importing a car for a specific race weekend, the container ship does not know about your race weekend.

Parts that miss the boat become their own import

The wheels did not make it.

Nova Proto could not get them to the shipper before the car sailed, so they followed later in a separate container. That is not simply a delayed delivery — it is a second customs entry, with its own paperwork, its own clearance, its own duty and its own collection. It also had to be entered under the correct entity name, which is the same trap as above wearing a different hat.

The car docked in late August. The wheels turned up a few weeks later.

So: if anything is being supplied alongside the car, ask explicitly whether it is going in the same container. If the answer is no, or "probably," budget time and money for a second import rather than discovering it later.

The tariff lesson — learned on a parts shipment

This did not happen with the car. It happened a year earlier on an air-freighted box of parts from the same factory, and it is the most useful thing we have learned about importing from Europe.

A shipment of prototype race car parts with a declared value of a little over four thousand euro came back with a duty demand of more than half the value of the goods. Not a 15% line. More than fifty percent of what the parts cost.

The reason was not that race car parts attract punitive duty. It was that the paperwork did not properly declare the metal content, and separately, the HS codes on the entry did not match the commercial invoice.

Two things worth understanding here:

Metal content matters, and it has to be quantified. There are tariff lines that apply to the steel and aluminium content of a product rather than the product itself. If the exporter does not break that content out properly, the entry can default to the worst-case treatment on the full value. Quantifying metal content is ordinary practice in manufacturing — we deal with it on the production side of our own business — but a small race car constructor filling in an export form may never have had to do it.

HS codes have to match the invoice. When the codes on the entry and the descriptions on the invoice disagree, nobody at the border resolves it in your favour. They apply what the paperwork says.

The other thing that stung: because the error originated with the sender rather than the carrier, the dispute could not be resolved before payment. The options were pay now and pursue a post-entry refund, or refuse and have the shipment returned to France. Neither is a good option when you need the parts.

We now treat the exporter's paperwork as something to review before the goods ship, rather than something that happens to us afterwards. Ask the factory for the commercial invoice and the HS codes in advance and actually read them. It is a ten-minute job that can save four figures.

The one with the longest lead time: an EPA exemption

This is the step most people do not know exists, and it is the one that will catch you out, because it is not something you can hurry.

A race car coming into the United States is not a road vehicle, and it does not meet the emissions requirements that apply to one. It comes in under an exemption — and you have to apply for that exemption in writing, with supporting documentation and photographs of the vehicle, before the car can clear.

When we filed ours, the EPA's acknowledgement came back with a plain statement of the timeline: exemption requests can take 14 to 21 business days to process. That is three to four calendar weeks, and the clock does not start until your submission is complete and correct.

It is also worth reading their disclaimer carefully. An acknowledgement that the request has been received is explicitly not a compliance determination and not a guarantee that the vehicle is legal to import. Receipt and approval are different things.

So: start the exemption before the car ships. Not when it sails, not when it docks. A container sitting on a dock accrues storage charges while you wait for a government agency to work through its queue, and there is no expediting it.

The car as we first saw it — unloaded at the receiving warehouse.

Collecting the car

The last step is the least glamorous. The car cleared and was unloaded in Northern California — not a short drive from Lake Forest — and somebody has to go and get it with a trailer big enough and a day free.

Worth knowing in advance: which port or warehouse it will actually be released at, whether there is a free-time window before storage charges start, and whether you need an appointment to collect. We borrowed a trailer and made the trip.

The NP01 in the Lang Racing shop, Lake Forest. Worth the paperwork.

What we would tell someone doing this

• Use an agent for your first one. The money buys somebody who has done it before.
• Do the POA the day you pay, not the day it ships.
• Make every document say the same company name. Invoice, POA, tax paperwork. Check before it sails.
• Read the export paperwork before the goods move — particularly HS codes and any metal content declaration.
• Ask what is not in the container. Anything following separately is a second import.
• Put slack in the schedule. Vessels get changed and dock dates move.
• Know where you are collecting from and what your free time is before storage charges begin.

None of this is a reason not to do it. The car is here, and it is a genuinely special thing. But the process is administrative rather than mechanical, and the failure modes are all paperwork — which means they are all avoidable if you know to look for them.

More on this car

• Norma M20 FC engine development — the 2.3L stroker K20
• Choosing the Norma M20FC chassis
• Endurance racing the number 03 Norma M20