Bentley Wishes, Ferrari Dreams Come True, at Least for a Day

James Kim, foreground, general manager of Capital Dream Cars, with CEO brother-in-law Eugene Kim and two of their cars, a red Ferrari and a Bentley Continental. (Photos By Rich Lipski -- The Washington Post)

A man with a child in tow leaves a store just off Route 50 in Middleburg. After taking a few steps, he is suddenly afflicted with rubber-neck syndrome. Something has caught his eye. He pauses. The little girl holding his hand staggers forward, pulling his arm. But he's somewhere else, perhaps imagining what it feels like to tap the clutch and hit the gas on the red Ferrari passing by.

Down the road, two guys in a black Ford Mustang are equally enraptured. The passenger slaps the driver across his chest. Look. Their heads jerk left and they stare at the red wonder.

It's the type of reaction Eugene Kim, 35, has grown accustomed to when driving one of his company's rental cars.

High school kids go crazy at stoplights, screaming out of car windows. " WE LOVE YOUR RIIIDDDE ."

Kim is nearly a celebrity in the minutes it takes to drop off the cherry-red 2001 Ferrari 360 Spider, but his business,he says, is facilitating fantasies.

On a recent weekend, he drives with the top down, headed toward a quaint restaurant in Middleburg. The air sweeps over the convertible like a steady, stifled thunder. There's no point in listening to the radio. Who needs it?

"It's the sound of the engine that's music to my ears," says Kim, a physician who moonlights as an auto-fantasy deliveryman. When you're sitting in your SUV, Kim is the guy who might be gliding by in a Bentley, but for him, it's the Ferraris that matter most. He is a co-owner of Capital Dream Cars, the Tysons Corner exotic car rental service that he, his wife, brother-in-law and a close friend opened in March.

For a day with the Ferrari, it's $1,450. A week is $7,550, but that's a small price in comparison with the thrill, Kim says. At least that's what he and his business partners are counting on.

Cue the corporate executives and celebrities. And don't forget the women wanting to surprise their husbands and boyfriends, and the men -- firefighters, policemen, business owners, engineers -- just wanting to drive a little sumptin' sumptin' for at least one day in their lives.

"It was more the look on Tamara's face that got me going," physical fitness trainer Richard Gartmon, 41, says of his wife.

It takes a lot to move her, he says. And until the couple took the Ferrari out for a spin on Memorial Day weekend, Gartmon had no idea his wife, a chief network engineer at Northrop Grumman, was such a car buff.

"It puts you in a whole other place, where everything that's going on around you at the time doesn't matter because you're so engulfed in the excitement and the thrill of the ride," Tamara Gartmon, 35, says. They've rented the Ferrari twice and plan to rent again.