Picking up where I left off…
The economy in Dubai has slowed down considerably during the global crisis of the past year. Just the difference in the past 4 months between my two trips differences can be noticed. As my friends in Dubai pointed out, the number of exotic cars on the street have reduced considerably. Many people were living beyond their means and speculating on real estate (no different than what happened in the US or elsewhere). As a result, now is a great time to be buying used high end cars in the UAE marketplace because there are a lot of cars on the market right now.
With that being said, those who are very talented at business, who have good savings strategies or who are just born into fortunate circumstances still enjoy the crazy car extremism that is already well documented on the internet. Most of my friends are talented in business, in an environment that is thriving. The mid east has had an earth shattering rate of growth over the past decade, those who were well positioned and took advantage of the growth have profited enormously.
So now we get to the point about the cars…Unfortunately most of what I would want to show you, I can not. The owners of the cars would like things to be anonymous in many cases. So I’ll just say that before this trip I had never seen a Gemballa Mirage GT (Carrera GT modified to a crazy level), and after the trip I have seen not one but two first hand that my friends own. Besides that, pretty much every car besides the Pagani Zonda I was able to check out in some form or another. Multiple Veyrons, a Reventon, an older Bugatti (EB110), etc. The EB110 was really special for me since I’ve never seen one before I doubt I will again…it was the last “real” Bugatti. before it became VW. I cant imagine the satisfaction of owning a EB110 and a Veyron in the same color. Truly there are some amazing car collections over there.
Above: I shrunk this down enough to show you a random shot when I was sitting with my friends at a villa in Dubai.
The shot above is at the largest Mercedes dealership in the world. And seriously, it was…I was grateful for a complete behind the scenes tour of the new facility which was cutting edge in every way. This was the separate service area for the Maybachs and SLRs. I feel like the world’s largest concentration of SLRs must be in the mid east. One of my friends even has two of them. Oh, and this Mercedes dealership has a 722 GT (the new race car) in their showroom. I dont think there are many (if any) other Mercedes dealerships that can say they have a 722 GT on their showroom floor. Most dealerships are still bragging about having one SL65 Black Series (this dealership I think had 4 or so of those).
In short, everything is bigger in the mid east. It is a culture with huge ambitions for business and one which is set on being the biggest and the best at whatever they build. With huge masterplanned cities going up seemingly overnight, their push into the future is not slowing down as much as the media might suggest (although it has slowed a bit). Places like Dubai who are not benefiting from oil money like other areas (like Saudi Arabia for example) are still reliant on innovation and entrepreneurship, two things that I personally love and enjoyed seeing out there.
Lastly - the intro picture is Ebrahim’s street Supra. Yes, his street car. His race car is way more nutty! The turbo on this street car is so damn big he made a custom hood to work around it. For pics you can check out www.gt-rr.com and look under Ebrahim in the customer car gallery for some of his other rides too. Ebrahim has one of the cleanest/nicest personal workshops I’ve seen. All of his cars are super clean!
Next, I’d like to show you one of the coolest garages I’ve seen. That will be my last post on the trip coming soon.
