Are you a gentleman of a certain age, looking to spoil yourself with a once-in-a-lifetime car ? Your local Porsche dealer will show you the 532-horsepower 911 GTS, priced at $164,900 and up. This will impress your neighbors, local teenagers, and even your valet. Unfortunately, it will also earn you some gently dismissive smirks from the thousands of amateur race drivers in this country, all of whom know that the Porsche is a paper tiger, a soft and feckless luxury sled suited for nothing more rigorous or sporting than the Saturday morning coffee-shop parking-lot car shows. Faced with this reality, you have two choices. The first is to buy a Porsche anyway and accept whatever derision comes your way from the weekend warriors in their Miatas and McLarens. The second: to leave them all gasping in your wake, courtesy of the Sebeco SPX.
You’ve never heard of Sebeco, which is fine with them. The Georgia-based firm builds nothing but diminutive race cars of extraordinary capability and relatively modest price. They’re not street-legal, and there’s room for just one person in their fishbowl-style cockpits. Their top-of-the-line SPX has air conditioning and a radio, although not as you probably know them. The AC sends cold water through a series of tubes in a special shirt that you wear, and the radio can only be tuned to the channel of your pit-side race crew. The engine sits inches from the back of your head, making an absolutely infernal amount of noise. Your 6-foot-2-inch, 250-pound author had no trouble fitting into the car, but it would be claustrophobic for anyone more than a little bit taller or wider. Entry and exit is via a flimsy flip-up fiberglass door of a type familiar to anyone who has raced the prototype class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
In fact, the entire experience is about what you’d get from the multimillion-dollar Le Mans prototypes entered by Bentley, Audi, Ferrari, and others, just at a slightly more approachable scale. With that in mind, I tested the Sebeco SPX at Putnam Park Road Course outside Indianapolis, recording complete speed and timing data for the purpose of comparison with an actual “LMP3” racing prototype. It could cost you well over $1.5 million to own and race an LMP3 for a full American season. Go to Europe, and you can expect to more than double that figure. By contrast, the Sebeco can be run in the U.S.-based, and slightly misnamed, World Racing League for about $10,000 per weekend, less if you buy the car up front for a price in the $150,000 range depending on equipment.
Given that exponential difference in cost, you’d expect a similar difference in speed, and it’s true that the LMP3 can reach 151 mph on Putnam Park’s short front straight, against the Sebeco’s peak of 130 mph. After that, however, the balance shifts to favor the lighter, nimbler SPX. At the end of the lap, the difference is just a bit over 2 seconds, in the LMP3’s favor. So if you have an extra million dollars in your pocket, you’d want the LMP3. The rest of us will be quite satisfied with the Sebeco. Both cars, of course, are much faster around this track than the Porsche 911 you can get out of a showroom. They’re also faster than the track-prepared Porsches used by professional racers at Le Mans, Daytona, and elsewhere.
So far, Sebeco’s customers have largely been experienced amateurs who have outgrown the capabilities of their Lamborghinis , Ferraris , and the like. This isn’t a machine you master in an afternoon. In that respect, the challenge of Sebeco ownership is like that of golf. The point is to get better over time. And at the new generation of “country club” private racetracks across America, where well-heeled owners swap lurid tales of outrageous speed and derring-do over post-session drinks, owning one of these teardrop-shaped rocket ships is like swinging a driver straight off the PGA Tour .
Sebeco’s equivalent to the “teaching pro” in golf would be their partners at Stratus Racing, who in addition to maintaining and repairing your car during a race or practice weekend can provide a credentialed professional to help you get up to speed. For my day in the SPX, I had Formula 4 and LMP3 veteran Ben Waddell as a coach. He set a time in the car, and then we worked on getting me closer to that reference time using state-of-the-art data analysis. The process was simple and easy to understand, and my experience of gradually improving in a “two steps forward, one step back” manner will be familiar to anyone trying to learn a new sport as an adult.
Which is an appropriate analogy because SPX ownership is less like buying a new luxury watch and more like buying a set of really high-performance skis. You’re in for an unforgettable time, but it will take some effort on your part to make it happen. Truthfully, it’s too much work for the average luxury sports car buyer who is primarily concerned with making an impression in a parking lot or on the freeway. Happily for Sebeco, there are enough type A competition people out there to keep the order books full and the coaching staff busy.
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They’re not alone in this niche, of course. The 800-pound gorilla of the industry is U.K.-based Radical Motorsport, which has sold a few thousand miniature prototypes around the world over the past three decades. I race a Radical SR8, which is more powerful and visceral than the Sebeco but also, with its open-air driving position, continually offers me a chance to get hit in the face with errant debris at 165 mph, something of which my family disapproves. Over on the closed-cockpit, safety-oriented side of things, McLaren, AMG, and other manufacturers sell preassembled, non-street-legal “GT4” race cars, which typically cost more than $200,000, are ruinously expensive to operate, and often can’t quite match the Sebeco on track pace. A host of firms such as Rush and SCCA Enterprises sell slower and more affordable race cars for people with a lower tolerance for risk, both personal and financial.
With the SPX, Sebeco clearly thinks it has a Goldilocks solution for people who can’t swing the seven figures of a Le Mans Prototype but would also like to go faster than the average supercar driver. After a day on the track with it, I’d be inclined to agree. If IMSA, the professional body for prototype racing in America, is like MLB, this is like playing for the Toledo Mud Hens. It’s just a step away from The Show. And if the idea of blasting through turns at triple-digit speeds and lateral forces of 2 g or more doesn’t get your heart racing, well, I’m absolutely certain that Porsche would still love to sell you a 911 GTS, for all of those extra-special trips to Trader Joe’s .
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
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