FYI - Impact Racing gear Decertified by SFI for counterfeiting (Page 1 of 3)

Just got this myself, am looking into the ramifications...

All of Impact products. I got shoes from them luckily i have a two back up pairs of Simpson's.

Edit: Everything is affected except helmets but I would no be trusting them either even though they are still legal for now. Remember also late  last year they were also involved with having conterfit HANS clips. So this makes me very suspect of any item that they make.

Son of a... why do I get the feeling Impact Racing will be filing Chapter 11 before I get a full refund for my brand new (expensive) suit?

Helmets are certified through Snell,  so as of right now, a Snell certified Impact helmet should be ok.   But, we'll have to see what the fallout from this will be.

Yup. If there was any question about the gear actually being substandard, that's not covered by the SFI press release.

Crap. My Heathcliff suit is an Impact suit. Wonder what Jay et al. are going to do about this going forward.

I wonder if SFI can retroactively decertify gear pursuant to their contracts. It would surprise me if Impact (which Bill Simpson started after he left Simpson Perfomance Products) doesn't file suit against SFI in Federal court in Indianapolis on Monday. This will cripple their business if not put it under immediately. Every Impact retailer in the nation will be on the horn trying to return their products on Monday morning. Still no update on the Impact website in response to this either.

you called it Mulry
IR has tagged their page
http://www.impactraceproducts.com/

what concerns me...

1. I own equipment that says it was made in China. Not cheap stuff, but certainly not made in China. I will not post the names.

2. They all have SFI certifications like they are supposed to have.

so if one company has done this, what is to say that others have done the same thing. After reading a few books on the goings on with manufacturing on China I would say that this might not be an isolated incident.
Ultimately with some businesses today, money makes the choices

i'm a member on a drag racing forum. some of those folks have been around racing longer than i've been alive. they know bill simpson.it has been said he walks to the beat of a different drummer.

remember, this is the fella who set himself on fire to prove his stuff worked as advertised.........

"The SFI Foundation, Inc. offers two levels of participation for sanctioning bodies: membership and affiliation. The first level is the Affliate Program which allows a sanctioning body to use and include SFI specifications in its rules. A sanctioning body must have a formal agreement with SFI at this basic level in order to cite the SFI copyrighted standards in its rules."

http://www.sfifoundation.com/

I don't see 24HOL on their list of sanctioning bodies.  Now that SFI's lawyers have the Impact distraction going on, it might be a good time to either rewrite our rules to de-specify SFI, or belly up to the bar and get a membership.

Impact has updated their message today. Here's the screenshot:

Now, here's the rundown on what's happened legally in this case thus far. SFI filed its counterfeiting lawsuit against Impact in federal court in Indianapolis on Friday afternoon. For those who care about such things, it's case No. 1:10-cv-036LJM-DML in the Southern District of Indiana As the Impact statement above notes, there is a hearing set for April 1, 2010 on SFI's temporary restraining order. In the lawsuit, SFI is seeking both money damages and to force Impact to stop selling products bearing the SFI certification label.

My initial impression from reading through SFI's complaint is that Impact has a doozy on its hands. SFI has sued for counterfeiting, fraud, and breach of contract, among other allegations. The gist of the lawsuit is accurately stated in SFI's original statement online last Friday. SFI has secured the sworn testimony of a former Impact employee who has testified under oath that Bill Simpson directed him, from 2005 through 2008, to secure counterfeit SFI labels from a manufacturer in Hong Kong and that those labels were affixed to Impact seat belts, arm restraints, fire suits, head socks, gloves, and boots. That former employee's sworn testimony is filed as an exhibit to the lawsuit.

Yowza.

If this testimony is accurate (and it might not be; although sworn testimony is typically more reliable than unsworn testimony owing to the penalty for perjury if caught lying under oath, and this could be a former employee with an axe to grind against Bill Simpson (say, for getting fired following the drag racing suit controversy?) then Impact is going to have a tough row to hoe.

For those who are interested, I am posting and sharing the court documents at the link below. The linked document contains a copy of the original verified complaint and all the exhibits to the complaint so that you can check it out for yourself. It's 63 pages and about 4Mb total, although the complaint itself is only 14 pages and the really sexy stuff is only a couple pages of that. If you want to hit just the highlights, jump straight to Page 5, Paragraphs 19 and read through Page 6, Paragraph 27.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0By … &hl=en

On top of which, I can just about guarantee that sometime in the next week or two, Impact is going to find itself the defendant in an enormous consumer class action lawsuit seeking both compensatory and punitive damages from Impact for every racer (and racing organization) that now owns worthless Impact racing gear.

Note that Impact's statement on their website advises that they are not accepting returns of delivered products. Their cash flow just went to zero and the outflow of legal fees on a bloodletting scale is just about to begin.

I don't see how Impact survives this lawsuit (and the forecast class action lawsuit) absent filing Chapter 11 and, as part of the re-organization plan, canning all senior management, including Bill Simpson.

This is going to get uglier before it gets resolved.

Guess I'd better buy a new suit pronto.

I'm not so sure.  SFI has declared that Impact gear is no longer certified.  Any outside company that checks the Impact gear would still have to affix a SFI tag, which does no good.  Sanctioning bodies will have to honor SFI's decertification.