Following the discovery of counterfeit parts being sold through Summit Racing in Speedmaster-branded packaging, Summit has removed all Speedmaster products from its inventory and has cut ties with the brand.
[Fake Out: Spotting Counterfeit Speed Parts]
The discovery was made after Broader Performance founder Jay Robarge posted a video to YouTube addressing a customer who called to warranty a part …
The nerve of some companies. Speed master even copied the logo.
Sad part is Speedmaster actually makes a bunch of obsolete parts I've purchased and needed. Or they make a cheap replica part I can modify to fit and not worry if I ruin it.
sounds like Summit is trying to handle this honorably. good on them.
AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:sounds like Summit is trying to handle this honorably. good on them.
do you think the public will ever get a comment from Speedmaster?
Good for Summit! It is the correct thing to do.
Summit pretending like they had no idea who Speedmaster is as a company or what they were selling is honestly hilarious. They only are doing this because they got called out.
Speedmaster has been selling knockoff and blatant copies of intakes, head studs and valvetrain components for years.
In reply to RacetruckRon :
No way is this to be construed as sticking up for Speedmaster, but a lot of what they copied is not exactly proprietary intellectual property or material. The valve body and turbo400 trans cases surely were tho...
Yes, Speedmaster has been selling cheap copies of other designs, but putting someone else's logo on them had been a line they supposedly wouldn't cross. Now it looks like they may have also been selling outright counterfeits through some other channel and got their inventory mixed up. At best, they may have been sourcing parts from a counterfeiting operation and didn't check whose logo was on the incoming parts, which would mean Speedmaster's QC department has oatmeal for brains (or outright doesn't exist).
In reply to Ranger50 :
The valve body is a bit crass even for the Chinese. However, the branding on the knockoff part is the only thing new here. The Speedmaster LS2 intakes were exact copies of the early Weiand LS intakes. Speedmaster has been stealing IP spitting out copies of parts for the last 10 years at least and Jegs and Summit have been complicit the whole time. This is just a step further and is full blown fraud, trying to pass the Speedmaster part off as a Broader Perfomance part and the only reason it stopped is from the video that Broader Performance put out that gained some traction.
Speed master rebrand in 5... 4... 3...
In reply to RacetruckRon :
Not gonna lie here but business is business... Many other business have bemoaned that once they sold a single thing to "xyz corp", they found it elsewhere for cheaper and of lesser but still usable quality.
Can you even buy a new weiand LS intake anymore?
As to the VB, the Chinese just went too hard on replication. Their culture underlies a notion that copying something not of their own design is ok and you should be flattered they did it in the first place.
Is it even possible to buy parts online that aren't cheap Chinese knockoffs? I would rather rebuild something than replace it with a new assembly, but only if rebuild parts are available that aren't cheap Chinese knockoffs.
In reply to Tyler H :
If I could afford it more often, I have bought from Motion Raceworks a few times.
Ranger50 said:In reply to RacetruckRon :
Not gonna lie here but business is business... Many other business have bemoaned that once they sold a single thing to "xyz corp", they found it elsewhere for cheaper and of lesser but still usable quality.
Can you even buy a new weiand LS intake anymore?
As to the VB, the Chinese just went too hard on replication. Their culture underlies a notion that copying something not of their own design is ok and you should be flattered they did it in the first place.
Not arguing with this at all. It's well known that the Chinese copy everything. I've worked with a lot of Chinese vendors for work and even custom one off projects for my own personal stuff. When I do deal with Chinese companies for custom projects the parts are purposely misnamed and the true application is either not shared on the internet or never meant to be sold commercially. And I'm not claiming to be innocent on buying chinese parts, I have a knockoff aeromotive fuel pressure regulator sitting on the shelf because it cost me $25 off ebay a couple years ago and I have a $14 knockoff Greddy BOV sitting right next to it.
My main problem with this whole thing is the very disingenuous response from Summit of "OMG that's terrible we'll remove those right away. How could this evil chinese company ever trick us into selling these knockoff parts." It's a bunch of crap. The Summit merchant buyer had to at some point reviewed all of the specifications of the product being sold: weight, material, finish, Country of Origin, packaging and physical product itself, etc. If they are claiming they haven't done this they are woefully negligent and nobody should buy a damn thing from then ever again.
^This,
I like Summit, but this is basically corporate CYA in hopes they aren't named when the inevitable lawsuit and cease and desist orders are filed.
RacetruckRon said:Summit pretending like they had no idea who Speedmaster is as a company or what they were selling is honestly hilarious. They only are doing this because they got called out.
Speedmaster has been selling knockoff and blatant copies of intakes, head studs and valvetrain components for years.
I typed out almost exactly that this morning but was interrupted before I could post it. I like dealing with Summit, they're usually my first choice if I'm buying something they carry, but it's naïve, at best, to think otherwise. Ignorance is no excuse, they knew exactly what they were doing, and if not, they should have.
In reply to RacetruckRon :
In the other thread, I posted the version of the same VB I received from Jegs along with the email I also received related to it. It looks like to me that the replicator/manufacturer changed, which is why this is of concern. So I can get behind summit/jegs saying we didn't know. They get a truckload of assumed "good" parts and sells them. It isn't their exact job to re qc the parts they got outside of saying, "yup 25 c4 trans brake valve bodies." If they were in if themselves using the product to make their own other product, I get your point. They are nothing more than the walmartesqe of high performance auto parts.... if it really mattered a lot, people wouldn't be buying the crap at Walmart... Jmo.
Mr_Asa said:Speed master rebrand in 5... 4... 3...
Won't be the first time for the company formerly known as Professional Products...
Geez. I hope my Speedmaster fuel cell isn't a cheap imitation.
Maybe that's why the instructions say the sending unit terminals are marked G and S in the instructions BUT it was not marked at all!
There is too much irony here to wash off in one bath.
So... what are the chances that anyone has any super discounted Speedbasterd products on clearance. Asking for friends.
In reply to QuasiMofo (John Brown) :
If Summit drops the brand, I'd expect a rush of Speebastard products coming soon to Ebay and Amazon. This will just be done until Speedbastard rebrands themselves and/or then repackages the products to new brand logo boxes.
John Welsh said:In reply to QuasiMofo (John Brown) :
If Summit drops the brand, I'd expect a rush of Speebastard products coming soon to Ebay and Amazon. This will just be done until Speedbastard rebrands themselves and/or then repackages the products to new brand logo boxes.
They are already all over eBay and have been since before Summit carried then.
What is kind of amusing is that Summit brand parts are already largely Chinese knockoffs of name brand items.
Quite a few of the Summit branded parts were supposedly made by Professional Products or Speedmaster.
But there's a good reason almost any speed parts company in the US, regardless of whether they have any ethics about copying the competition, won't touch copying a trademark. It's really tough to get a patent to cover a lot of performance product designs, while taking action against a clear trademark violation is a slam dunk when it's the exact same logo on a part the trademark owner sells. About the only way to lose a trademark case is to abandon the trademark (such as how Chump Car took over the Champ Car name, although that wasn't a court case) or try to enforce a trademark on something not really related to your use (such as the tussle between Nissan Motor Company and Mr. Nissan's computer shop).
You'll need to log in to post.
