By Bravetta Hassell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 22, 2006
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.
Why rent an Explorer -- or anything else, for that matter -- when you could get a Ferrari for a little more than a grand, asks Matt Vondra, 27, a mining company executive in Chicago. He had come in April for a weekend with his buddy, and the Ferrari was "sort of a treat."
"It has a really clean sound to it," he says.
Kim knows all about that. This Ferrari has his heart.
This was one of the few days he had some alone time with the car. And he took the busy streets with ease, revving up and then drifting down the hills just past the western edge of Fairfax County.
"I never get tired of driving this," Kim says later. "Just the way all your senses are heightened."
He sounds like a man in love. And not that juvenile obsession, "I've got to see you every minute of the day" kind of love. It's the sincere "I care about you," "I understand you" kind of love -- from its underbody aerodynamics to the free-flow exhaust system to the Connolly leather.
"There's nothing like driving an Italian thoroughbred like this Ferrari," Kim says, rubbing his hand over the car's black dashboard.
They had spent months looking for a company that would insure the expensive cars they would buy for commercial use. Kim; his wife, Jumi Kim; her brother James Kim; and family friend James "BMW" Kim then pooled money from their personal savings and worked with investors to buy the vehicles. First came the Ferrari, which goes for about $200,000 these days, then the Maserati Spyder (recently sold because it wasn't popular enough) and then the charcoal gray 2005 Bentley Continental GT (about $170,000).
Factoring in the money for upkeep of the cars and the property tax that isn't "insignificant," Eugene Kim will tell you that getting the business off the ground wasn't easy. But the result was a business in which pragmatism isn't the priority.
Capital Dream Cars is one of at least two exotic car dealerships that serve the Washington metro area. The other, Pure Exotics, also opened this year. There are about 50 such car rentals across the country, according to the Exotic Car Rental Directory.
Firefighter paramedic Jamie Cooper, 35, found Capital Dream Cars while surfing the Internet in search of an alternative to renting a limousine for his wedding.
He stumbled onto "The Ferrari."
The choice was a surprise to Meagan Cooper, a laboratory technician whom he married in May. "I think she was thinking it would be a Dodge Viper or some other kind of regular sports car," he says.
Meagan, 25, lighted up when she saw the car the night before the wedding, her husband recalls. So excited, she jumped behind the steering wheel before Jamie had a chance. Everyone oohed and aahed as the couple showed up at the rehearsal dinner, where the guests spent more time outside ogling the car than inside preparing for the ceremony.
"It was a crowd stunner," Meagan says. Driving down the Dulles Greenway, Jamie didn't think he'd ever been stared at so much.
"The car's just begging, 'Please let me go, please open it up,' " he says. "It takes a lot of restraint not to." The Leesburg couple has set aside a special savings account to buy one some day. For now, Jamie will love his Dodge Ram 2500 and Meagan her Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.
Kim's own passions have a long history. Even as a teenager, the Northern Virginia native loved Ferraris so much that he volunteered at a dealership. "Clerical work. Filing. It was mundane work," he says, but he was able to be near the cars, smell them, see them, hear them.
He'd talk with mechanics, sneak moments to sit in the cars.
"My family thought I was crazy," says Kim, who now has two young children of his own. "They never understood my passion for cars."
He doesn't have to worry about that anymore. Now fellow car lovers come to him, ready to pay for a piece of the fantasy.
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