Insurance for DE

[IMQKRNU]

I attempted to process a claim for a DE accident through State Farm years ago.  While they did not pay the claim for many reasons, they did teach me a little bit about insurance. 

1) Autocross is considered a competitive event in the eyes of your insurer.  Therefore, your participation in DE can be construed to be training for your competitive autocross career.  State Farm hung their hat on the fact that they had a photograph of me taken at a PCA autocross in the car insured with them.  Insurance companies will do more than a little research to avoid writing a $56k check.

2) Even though they denied the claim, they asked if I still owed money on the car.  Apparently, they owe a fiduciary responsibility to the lienholder on your car, even if you were irresponsible and they denied the collision portion of the claim.  They said they would pay off my loan, and MAY come after me for reimbursement since they paid out on a claim that was outside of my policy guidelines. 

This should make you think.  Going forward, maybe the answer is to maintain a car loan on your car at all times, so the insurance company has to pay them if you wreck on the track.  I'd rather fight the insurance company in court as a defendant than as a plaintiff.  

In my case, I rescinded the claim to avoid being cancelled.  Yep, even though they were refusing the claim, they still intended to cancel my coverage, stating that they had learned things about my use of my automobiles that made me a bad risk.   When the replacement for my insured Porsche was a Mercedes S500, they believed that I had learned my lesson and would not be attending any further DE training events in their car.