| Sunday, September 14, 2008 |
12:49 - Start Your Engines
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It seems the time has come for me to explain what I'm doing on the East Coast, with so little fanfare, after spending my entire life to date at the opposite end of the country.
Believe me, it's the kind of thing that it's important to keep quiet about until just the right time. Now that all the pieces are in position, there's no reason to keep everyone in the dark anymore. Indeed, the more people who know about it, the better.
I moved to New York in order to go into business.
What kind of business, you ask? Well, this kind:
Exotic car rentals.
Well, not "exotic" per se. More like "high-performance". The kind of cars you can only get access to by owning them, or having a friend who's been building one in his garage for years and doesn't mind giving you a ride once in a while. Not the super-high-end exotics, like brand-new Lambos and Ferraris and the like; nor high-powered luxury cruisers like Bentleys and Aston Martins. See, the trouble with those is that you can already rent them, from any number of exotic rental places; but if you do, you're going to get manu-matic paddle shifters and non-defeatable traction control, and you generally won't get anything any more special than the bare-bones set of factory features either. You can go rent a Gallardo or an F430 for a couple of thousand bucks a day, sure; and you'll look great cruising down the boulevard or flashing your emblem'd keys at some long-eyelashed creature at the bar. But that's not why someone like me—or my business partner, whom some of you might know as Capitalist Lion—would want to rent a high-end car for ourselves.
We like manual transmissions. We like good audio systems. We like integrated nav units with iPod integration. And we like driving things like Lotus Elises and Porsche Caymans (as long as they're properly set up for spirited driving) more than Gallardos and F430s that aren't.
Our bet is that there are a lot of other people who feel the same way. Especially in New York, which is full of car guys who ache to get out into the winding roads in the Appalachian foothills once in a while. People who might not get the chance to drive for fun very often, and want to make the times they do count—by sampling from a whole spectrum of different cars that are specifically engineered (by us) to be drivers' cars, the way the magazines all describe them.
The fleet that we've been building since April:
• Lotus Elise (turbocharged)—a former race car, and prototype for a racing shop's turbo kit for Elises, now converted back to a street car and making a good 310 hp, in a car weighing 1900 pounds.
• Porsche Cayman S—Brand-new, with exhaust tuning and other mods; probably both of our favorite car of the whole fleet for just driving around town, since it's so well-balanced and flattering (downshifting and heel-and-toeing is ridiculously easy).
• BMW Z4 M—Something you'll almost never see on the street, since they don't even stock them at dealers; they have to be special-ordered. Drives like a cat that's trying to wriggle its way out of your arms, but if you hold on tight it really tears it up—the road, not your arms.
• Dodge Viper SRT/10 (supercharged)—The fastest rental car available in North America, or perhaps anywhere. 750 hp at the crank (this is all dyno-proven, by the way, and this was on a hot day, so it's a conservative estimate). Racelogic traction control added so it can actually make use of that power without skidding into a ditch. At high revs ("high" for this gargantuan engine means around 5000), sounds like the end of the world is nigh.
• Roush Mustang—built to Roush specifications, except we skipped their recommended supercharger and put on a better one from Ford Racing and Whipple. Now it's up to 550 hp at the crank, and it has a fully redone suspension to make it actually handle well too.
• Ferrari F355 GTS—The best of the (mid-engine) V-8 Ferraris, before they started getting ridiculously expensive and threw in extra weight and padding and intrusive driver aids for your trouble. Removable targa top, so it looks good and plays nice in sunny weather—and of course it's red over tan, the way it should be.
• Toyota Supra Turbo—Still being built, but by the time it's done it'll be in the 650-hp range without even trying hard.
Check the site; there are photos and videos of each of the cars. This whole effort has been an immense lesson in photo-documentation, and a crash course in car photography at that. (To say nothing of how much I've learned about putting cars together. To think that six months ago I was nervous about changing the oil in my A3; now I'm swapping out Viper shocks and talking Ferrari engine maintenance with guys at car audio shops.)
Where are all those pictures of my Lotus Esprit, one might well ask? Haven't I been driving it all over New York? —Well... not as much as I might have if we weren't spending 28 hours a day building and testing seven other cars, perhaps. Okay, to be honest, almost not at all. But that will probably change soon enough.
We've been open for business for a month or so now, and we've got our hands full. Every day and every customer is a new experience, and with each curveball we're thrown, we learn something new about how this business works. This is all very new to me (CapLion is the one with all the experience and expertise), so I don't know if I can make any accurate predictions about how I think things will go; but so far it all looks very, very encouraging. I think we found an untapped well of market demand, in a segment that's unserved, with a customer base that's bigger than anywhere else. Things might slow down at the end of fall and through the winter, but next year should be insane.
So, that's the story. Now that we've got the fully interactive version of the site rolled out (with which anyone who's in the area can book reservations right online, or sign up for our Performance Experience or Joy Ride programs—and I'm serious, anyone who reads this blog and who's in the general vicinity of New York, or even might be traveling this way for business or pleasure, drop me a line and we'll talk discounts), we can turn our attention back to what's going to be The Life for the foreseeable future: delivering cars, picking up cars, detailing cars, maintaining cars—maybe even driving cars. We can but hope.
We've given these cars a future of fame and glamour. The least they can do in return is make us rich.
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Brian Tiemann
