Americans have long had a love affair with cars, particularly fast ones. Many car enthusiasts collect muscle cars and compare horsepower, torque, and other performance metrics with each other. Not only do Americans love performance vehicles, they like to go fast. There are Facebook pages for owners of certain vehicles where owners discuss speed and passing others. Hollywood has long realized this, and from the Cannonball Run movie in 1981 to The Fast and the Furious franchise, which is on its ninth movie with Fast and Furious Presents:  Hobbs & Shaw, and another two movies planned for 2020 and 2021, we can't get enough of fast cars.

However speeding in a vehicle is dangerous, and studies have shown that the faster a vehicle is going the greater the chances there will be serious injuries or fatalities in event of an accident. Therefore, insurance companies do not provide coverage for racing activity. As always, the devil is in the details, and a recent question from a subscriber highlights that issue. Our subscriber drove a high performance vehicle through Xtreme Xperience, which allows people to take a brief class and then head out onto the track in vehicles such as a Porsche 911 GT3, a Lamborghini Huracan LP610-4, a Ferrari 458 Italia or other exotic vehicle. Being in the insurance industry, he asked his carrier that if anything had happened in the vehicle, would his umbrella policy have provided coverage. His carrier's answer was no, that it fell under their policy's racing, speed, demolition or stunting exclusion which reads in part that "damage caused while using any "automobile" while practicing for or participating in any prearranged or organized racing, speed, demolition or stunting content or activity." The carrier also referred to the Xtreme Xperience website that clearly states that an individual's personal insurance will not provide coverage and that it is necessary to buy one of their insurance packages for potential damage to the vehicle.

Our subscriber disagreed with the carrier, and asked us for our opinion.  Driving the exotic cars on a racetrack is not a racing activity; there is no prize for first place, and the drivers are not allowed to pass each other without the consent of the professional riding along with the driver for guidance. Therefore, it is not a racing activity, but it is a speed activity, since the point of the activity is to go faster than one is allowed to drive on public roads. We could see our subscriber's point, and were ready to agree with him but upon reviewing the policy language realized that it didn't just exclude racing activity, but speed activity. We had to agree with the carrier because of that wording; it is broad enough to exclude not just racing, but speed or demolition activity or contests. That is not the standard ISO wording, so we pulled up the ISO auto and umbrella policies.