Published on January 8th, 2013 | by Daniel Sherman Fernandez
0Swimsuit Model Jessica Barton’s Toyota Supra Stolen
Fame and fortune does not stop car thieves as we have just discovered. Florida swimsuit model and TV host Jessica Barton who has done dozens of swimsuit magazine shoots, endorsements, TV commercials and party appearances lost her custom-built 1994 1160bhp Toyota Supra. It was stolen 6 days ago and within hours found in pieces in a chop shop.
While known more for her bikini work Barton was not just an attractive face in the world of import sports car tuning, often running the Supra at drag strips and even using it as a daily driver. Last year, at the annual Texas Mile meet-up of the country’s fastest street-legal rides, Jessica Barton’s Supra out-tested a fleet of tuned Nissan GT-Rs and Lamborghinis, hitting 1160bhp on the dynomometer, thanks to a combination of turbos and nitrous; on drag strips, the car had covered a quarter mile in 8:64 seconds.According to Barton, thieves managed to steal the Supra sometime between 10pm and 4am from the city of Waterford. While auto thefts have been declining in recent years, more industrious thieves have turned to race cars and hot rods, since they’re often built with more expensive parts and frequently lack the anti-theft or tracking devices built into newer models. Barton offered a USD5,000 reward for the car, but later posted to Instagram that the offer came too late, sharing a photo of Supra pieces piled in a dirt lot. “That car has been evolving over 8 years and hundreds of thousands probably invested in it,” Barton said in a comment. “I could never just build another one. It’s impossible to do all this again. It’s a devastating loss to me.”
The rarity of the go-fast pieces built into the Supra might help authorities find the guilty parties, and Barton’s fans have vowed to comb the depths of Craigslist for leads. But fame may not give Barton any more justice than thousands of other chop-shop victims receive every year.