As his days throttling IndyCars up to 240 miles an hour begin to wind down, Helio Castroneves is looking forward to kicking back at a country club.
But Mr. Castroneves’s drives won’t be down a fairway. A new country club for the car set in Miami is more his speed.
“I don’t know what I’ll do when my career is over, but I know I’ll want to hang out around a racetrack with my friends,” said Mr. Castroneves, 44, winner of three Indianapolis 500 titles and millions of dollars in prize money. “I like boats, but that’s just not me. I enjoy golf, but I’m terrible. What I know very well is how to drive cars.”
While Florida is stacked with links, the private Concours Club is one of only a handful of such car clubs around the country. The goal is to match a desire to drive fast with family activities — pool, spa, restaurant, children’s programs — that create a golf club feel, for car enthusiasts.
But the Concours Club and its ilk do not come cheap, with six-figure initiation fees and five-figure dues that make private golf clubs look reasonably priced. And of course there are the cars, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and beyond.
The idea for Concours was born of escaping the winter up north. “Five years ago, I’m sitting down in Miami in our condo in South Beach and there’s every kind of car outside,” said Neil Gehani, a real estate investor and the club’s founder. “I thought, there has to be a club down here.”
After a call to his club outside Chicago, the Autobahn Country Club, where he raced Ferraris and got hooked on country club racing, he found there wasn’t one in South Florida. “I was told the land was too expensive,” he said. “That wasn’t acceptable to me. I wanted to be in Miami and I needed a private auto country club.”
The club, which is within Miami’s Opa Locka private airport, 14 miles west of Miami Beach, has cost $70 million to build so far. Mr. Gehani said 40 founding members were invited to join, paying a one-time $350,000 initiation fee with no annual dues. The club just released 100 additional spots, with an initiation fee of $150,000 and annual dues of $35,000. It plans to limit those memberships to 200.
“We want people to feel lucky to be there, like it’s Augusta,” Mr. Gehani said, referring to the home of the Masters golf tournament.
What separates car country clubs from racetracks is the amenities. They’re not just for the wealthy gearheads who want to talk about their cars. They’re for their spouses and children, as much to make the experience more luxurious as to provide car enthusiasts with a way to step away and race for a bit.
In addition to the track, the Concours Club has a 7,000-square-foot clubhouse, where the restaurant will be operated by a popular Miami chef, Brad Kilgore. The infield of the track has a football-field-size shade structure for people who want to dine with the roar of racing. There’s an 11,000-square-foot garage to service the racecars and, of course, clean and detail them.
Other tracks helped inspire the Miami club. The Thermal Club, outside Palm Springs, Calif., has four tracks over 450 acres, two restaurants and a BMW performance driving school. The club has 48 bungalows for overnight stays, as well as 268 home sites overlooking the racetracks. The initiation is $85,000, with monthly dues of $1,200.
The Atlanta Motorsports Park has two racetracks and a third track for kart racing. It also has a resort pool, conference center, outdoor cooking facilities and a putting green.
As at Concours, memberships are tiered. An initial group of 10 founding members paid $200,000 to join. The top membership now costs $50,000 for 180 days of track time and runs down to $10,000 for 60 days. A karting membership costs $2,500. (Monthly fees range from $150 to $225 a person, plus a daily fee of $30.)
The granddaddy of these clubs, Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, Ill., began as one man’s desire to recreate the golf clubs of his youth, just for cars.
“I’d go ripping up the driveway to my parents’ country club in my Trans Am, and the manager would come out screaming,” said Mark Basso, the founder. “I thought. ‘Hey, you get in trouble if you disappear for a weekend to go drive cars, but no one got in trouble for bringing their family to the country club where they could hang out and disappear for a few hours to play golf.’”
Autobahn has benefited from ample space, with land far cheaper in north-central Illinois than in Palm Springs, Atlanta or Miami, to focus on making it family-friendly. Full membership costs $40,000, with annual dues of $5,250.
These clubs do have constraints, on noise, speed and, unlike golf clubs, drinking, for obvious reasons. Members also need to be certified to drive at high speeds on the tracks for the safety of other members.
Mr. Castroneves, who lives in Fort Lauderdale and is ranked 29th in the IndyCar Series, said he could hit 240 m.p.h. in an IndyCar race. But at car country clubs, most drivers top out at 150 m.p.h.
“People don’t know the difference between 180 and 140 m.p.h.,” he said of the club tracks. “You can still hit the corners in first and second gear, and that creates the noise and the feeling of accelerating.”
Real estate — in this case, dream garages with accommodations — is part of the offering.
Members at the Thermal Club are obligated to buy a lot and build a house within five years, said Tim Rogers, the club’s founder. The lots cost from $750,000 to $900,000, with the finished 8,000-square-foot homes running about $3 million.
Concours is building 62 garages that will fit six to 12 cars and rent at $2,000 to $5,000 a month. They will have lounges and bedrooms. The club is also offering 15,000-square-foot villas, from $4 million to $6 million; they have room to store 20 cars but also to put in wine cellars, movie theaters and pools.
Jeremy Porter, chief executive of the Atlanta Motorsports Park, said there were 205 rental garages and he had plans to build 135 houses for its 585 members.
The clubs’ founders bristle at the suggestion that the living might be too loud. “I don’t think about it as noise,” Mr. Gehani said. “I think about it as being at the track.”
And it’s that mentality that’s propelling the growth in this high-price niche. Charles A. Barge, the chief executive of the Aero Group, which engineers jet bridges and gates at airports, spent 30 years building his company with little break. Now he is building what he says will be a showpiece garage at the Atlanta Motorsports Park.
It started two years ago, when Mr. Barge, 56, said he decided to enjoy what he had built. He began to give up day-to-day control of his company, by selling shares to his employees, and took up two hobbies: boating and car racing.
“We did a one-day racing school and I was hooked,” he said. “I’ve driven fast a lot but never on a racetrack. I started talking to those guys about members.”
He joined at the highest level, which gives members 180 days on the track. After starting out driving his Audi R8 as fast as it would go, he bought a Radical RXC, a racecar that he said has reached 200 miles an hour.
“When I get off that track, my heart is beating,” he said. “It’s exhilarating. It’s like a drug.”
He added: “I tried golf. I just couldn’t do it. It’s too slow. I’ve talked to other people in the club who have similar mentalities. They all tried golf, but they just couldn’t get into it. They needed that outlet to go fast.”
And this sure beats a golf cart.
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December 20, 2019 at 08:00PM
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Country Clubs Where Drives Can Hit 150 M.P.H. - The New York Times
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