Dear all,

I want to warn you.
If you are planning a travel for your car to a FSAE competition, and you receive an offer by

John Deller from
ASAL Aviation Services & Logistics Ltd
or
Spice Racing Cars

for a return transport.
You have to be careful.

We sent them a deposit and we bought the flights for the team members.

A month later they told us that they will not respect the agreement, and we have to find another way to transport the car to the Formula Student Event.

At the end we paid another transport and I hope to see you in UK, anyway I want to warn you, to avoid this kind of problem.

It is better to compete in two events instead to pay twice for one.

-----------------------------------------
Università degli Studi di Firenze (ITALY)
105@FS2005

Hi,

Another story happened to us last year. He came to see us at the FSAE event in Detroit last year offering his services for last year FS. We were under discussions with a canadian carrier to ship the car by boat, but with the offer he had gave us, it was about the same price shipping the car by airplane than by boat and it was giving us 2 extra weeks of testing.

All the info was really mixed up, we had pay him and at first, gave us the wrong deposit number. After, he was telling us that he would not ship back the cars if he didn't had is money, that he had because I had the confirmation number and the transfer paper in order to an account he gave us and when the cars arrived (us, ETS, UQTR, McMaster), everything was mixed up. He had lost the tool boxes of McMaster, broke the power generator of UQTR and us, we had about 1/2 inch of water in the car since he left it outside during the night. And too top everything up, we had to drive 6 hours to drop the cars in Toronto and get them back since he was telling us that Montreal was a too small city to ship our cars off. (what!!!!)

Anyway, don't ever ship anything with this guy, he his a rip off.

Best way to ship your car is to organize it yourself. ETS, Waterloo and us (Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal) have shipped the cars yesterday in a container. We have a contract and a fixed price, a thing he always refused to gave us.

Kudos to the guy at ETS who organize it.

See you at FS2005

quote:

Spice Racing Cars

http://www.firstchoice.co.uk/info/aboutus/flightspressarchive.html#spice

people obviously ripping off fsae should be exposed... any more info about these guys?

We helped out the Missouri team last year when they came to aus. I spoke to John Deller a few times to organise picking up their car from the airport. When we got there he tried to tell us that we where picking up and storing Missouri's car and another car (I think it was RIT's ). After we told him we didn't have time to do 2 trips to the airport (it was about 10 days before the event) he hounded us to lend him our trailer, which we reluctantly did, just to get rid of him. So basically he tried to save himself some money by using us as his couriers. From the small amount of involvement we had with him there is no way we would trust him with our car, way to dodgy.

Is this the NZ guy who was trying to rake up business at FStudent last year, and also FSAE-A??

Yep,

this was the guy that Steve Daum suggested, but to any teams out there, don't ever send your little precious car with him. I know that UofT is sending their catr with him this year, I hope for them that he has changed in one year and their car will arrive in time. Last year, the car arrived one day later (at FS) the date he had gave us on a fax. And when it arrived in Canada, he shipped back the car at the name of his supposely son living in the States, making us a nightmare with customs since we had temporary import/export papers made to the name of our university. Try to explain that to the customs officers!!!


Oh well, I will never take his services again.

quote:

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Is this the NZ guy who was trying to rake up business at FStudent last year, and also FSAE-A??

Yeah.

He originally got involved when he transported the three UK teams (Birmingham, Oxford Brookes, and Leeds) to FSAE last year and on arriving realised he could make some money.

Subsequently he transported Birmingham to FSAE-A but (according to the team) he wasn't much good at returning calls and the impression I got was that they weren't confident of the car turning up. It did in the end but that's not the point obviouusly

I have spoken to the Birmingham faculty advisor today and he's said they will not be using him again.

Ben

Yeah, we had some damage to our car when it arrived in Australia that we had to fix up before competition. We also had the car sent back to a different city, where it sat for about a month before we were told it was back in the US. Then we had to drive to KC to pick it up and pay the fee for the company that kept it in storage which we did not get reimbursed until competition. I wasn't too pleased with the service myself, but we didn't get to make the decisions. I guess there's a reason that the price is low.

Is it the guy who was raking business at FS2004??

I took one look at that guy and said to my team

"don't trust him!!!"

I followed him around for a while too, to note his body language

quote:

Is it the guy who was raking business at FS2004??

Yes, it is.

Now he offers the car transportation to Detroit for £1800.00.

Daniele

I was hoping no one would remember he WAS a kiwi. He offered us shipping and for some of our drivers to race at Le Mans.

Seems like a shady guy.