The entertainer commissioned the Diablo knock-off 20 years ago, before he was famous, and just had it finished this year
- John Cena spent 20 years perfecting a long-ago-commissioned replica of a Lambo Diablo
- He just got handed the keys! —and is now selling the kit car on Bring A Trailer
- The entertainer is also selling off a way-cool V12-powered Jaguar XJ13 replica
If you’re an Extremely Online car enthusiast like half of the Driving.ca staff are, you may have heard recently about how wrestler-turned-movie-star John Cena just took delivery of a knock-off Lamborghini Diablo he’d commissioned 20 years ago, before he was famous and could, y’know, afford several real Lamborghinis. What you might not have heard is that, after recently being handed the keys to that long-awaited kit car, he’s now selling the thing off on Bring A Trailer.
We’ll recap the story, as told by Cena on a recent episode of the Club Shay Shay podcast, real quick for you: in 2003, Cena was an up-and-coming entertainer in the WWE, who had yet to approach anything near the celebrity he enjoys these days. Tight on cash but big on aspirations, he commissioned a kit-car-style replica of a Lamborghini Diablo VT powered by a used BMW V12, as that was all he could reasonably afford at the time.
“I didn’t want to spring for a Lamborghini, so I bought a fake one,” he told podcast host and well-known football player Shannon Sharpe. “This was 2003. I found a company that would do it, they put a V12 in it, I’m like ‘Man, it’s the same thing. It looks pretty good. It looks great!’”
Perusing the pics here, we have to agree—it looks pretty good. There are but a few tells, visually, that it’s not a real Diablo, at least if you’re not an expert. However, its build did not go “pretty good.” Two years after its commissioning, when it was “finished,” Cena was handed over a car that basically didn’t run. So the project was bounced around from one shop to another—10 shops in total, at a cost equal to one-and-a-half times the real deal, jokes(?) the wrestler.
Cena says on the podcast – filmed recently but on an unspecified date – that he just got the keys to the finished product last week. That’s a 20-year wait for a fake Lambo with a fibreglass body and a V12 that sounds okay, but not at all like a Lamborghini powerplant.
Like the Lamborghini, the car sports a V12 backed by a five-speed and wears fibreglass bodywork. Like the Lambo, bidding hovers around the US$75,000 mark (CDN$101,600) as of writing. Unlike the Lambo, replica Jaguar XJ13s can trade well into six-figure territory, though the quality of this particular build may be up for debate. At a glance, we’d still argue it’s the better of the pair leaving Cena’s garage to cross the block.
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