Just Two Weeks to Go!
First ever gathering of Exotics at RTC on February 14, 2009.
It’s hard to believe, but opening day, on April 1 is a little over two weeks away!
I read this week that the original Cars and Coffee Irvine is about to resume after a very long hiatus. They will be back in their original lot and we wish them tremendous success as we do all car shows. That event died years ago when Mazda said nope, no more.
What most of you don’t know was Cars and Coffee Irvine was the original catalyst and framework for starting E@RTC. I poop you not! With that, it’s time to tell the back story of how we began and their influence.
This is the complete story about our beginning, in gory detail. If you’re squeamish, you may want to look the other way. This is how the sausage was actually made. The big picture in all of this was how little things and persistence led to big things. Sort of like that date you later married, then divorced who took all your stuff and left you nothing but a bloody nub in a crappy apartment. No, this ends much better than that.
Leaving Cars and Coffee Irvine April 2008.
In early January 2008, I bought and kept a Lamborghini LP640 Roadster down in Orange County, California because that’s where there was a constant stream of exotic and rare car gatherings and drives and dinners in and around LA. Comparatively speaking, there were almost no regular car gatherings in the Seattle area.
That LP640 roadster had a top on it that putting on was worse than talking my old neighbor into wearing a bra. Without one, she looked like she was hauling water to camp, and like the Roadster, some things were best left alone without comment.
The Bellevue Lamborghini dealer was barely active back then, and I don’t believe they sold a single Murcielago in any form just yet. Even the salesman knew very little about the LP640 roadster variant, and I was looking for a specific car, in a specific color.
After checking all 32 dealers nation wide, that car just so happened to be in Orange County, California. The OC dealer as a part of the deal, also allowed me to store my car for free for the winter! That meant a lot less top wrestling. I figured it was better to leave the car in California than bring it to the rainy northwest where there was noting going on and, besides, it was raining. Once that ugly top was on, it looked like a cheap toupee, and that thing never looked any better than a shitty carpet no matter what was underneath. It was Britney Spears with a mullet. I knew it was kind of a warm weather car, right out of the box.
Christian Diamond found me through “LamboPower” one of the Lamborghini forums and saw that I was a local guy to him. He wrote me on the forums, then introduced me to John Eltringham who was a local Lamborghini owner in Bothell. We all met one afternoon at the Matador, and it was the two of them who told me about Exotics on Old Main. I went to see the gathering with Christian, and that’s where Vic and I first met. John Eltringham showed up that morning driving one of Roy Catz cars. He was driving Roy’s baby-shit brown Diablo (Sorry Roy hehehe) and Roy drove his American Flag Diablo. Love you Roy! I’ll never forget John pulling up with his head tipped to one side because he barely fit inside that thing.
Lovely!
I didn’t attend that Old Main show with my car because it was still in OC, and I thought the event wasn’t all that compelling or sustainable, but at least I met a few people while I was there and we had some laughs. When I was there, it wasn’t more than a dozen cars parked on both sides of Old Main near Bella Pastry. John, Roy Catz and a few others were trying to get me to bring my car to Seattle, and I was on the fence, but thought I’d bring it up later that year and give the area a try. I was still living in Redmond at the time and flying down to OC about every other weekend.
As it turned out, Vic and I had mutual friends through Apple which was how our fourteen year friendship began as of this writing. We had a lot to talk about as our company provided the Bluetooth software on the iPhone. We worked on the phone in secret beginning in 2005 so it was fun to talk to someone who was there.
After no real car activity in the Northwest that summer outside of John and I meeting downtown Kirkland, I decided to ship the car back down to California that late fall of 2008. As it turned out, it arrived on the very day the OC dealership collapsed in a big financial scandal. In fact, JP Transport called me in route to drop it off, and strongly suggested I not drop it at Lamborghini OC, so instead they took it to the Fairmont and left it with Ben Alexander, the front desk manager and friend. The dealership was “allegedly” selling cars while still showing them as bank-owned inventory. I was sort of living at the Fairmont because that’s where the car was.
I was clear of all that failure nonsense because I had title and registration, wire transfer records, the whole bit, and had them the very day I picked up my car. There are lots of rumors about why they let me store my for free, but you can probably guess what they were doing.
In parallel, Cars and Coffee Irvine was collapsing under its own weight. The event originally began as a group of exotic owners who’d gather at Crystal Cove, just north of Laguna Beach on a Saturday morning to talk about issues they had with their exotics, and it grew to the point where neighbors complained, shutting it down. It then moved to Irvine in the Mazda company parking lot where it grew to become a free-for-all of cars and people.
John Eltringham and I leaving Cars and Coffee Irvine fall 2008.
Cars and Coffee Irvine suddenly failed when the S2000 club showed up one Saturday morning with over 30 cars, taking every available spot, while a very rare Lamborghini Reventon that came down from Santa Monica on its own wheels couldn’t get into the show and had to go to the spectator lot. It created a firestorm of who had rights and what was the criteria to attend C&C- Irvine. It got nasty in a hurry.
The show was already getting lots of complaints for horrible behavior and it was kind of a bad thing. The whole event was just done. The reasons for the failure were something that made me take notice, so we didn’t make the same mistakes in Seattle if we decided to go forward and build a new show. It resumed a few years later then collapsed again. This is now the third try I think.
While I was in California, and all that summer, I attended every car show I could find. I visited shows from San Diego to Calabasas, along with a few shows in the Bay Area, many as a spectator passing through town in my daily driver. I also spent one weekend in Portland visiting the three shows that were arguing about location and rights that ultimately destroyed each other. It doesn’t go well when shows try to directly compete. It was like cheating wives bitch-slapping each other with purses. There was no point and nobody was going to win, but they did it anyway.
In the summer of 2008, I also visited every exotic dealer from Seattle to Chicago and down through St. Louis, then down to Dallas and back to San Diego, then north, along with any car shows I could find either in route or online that had some success. Some were nothing more than just a few cars and couldn’t draw flies, even if they had a dead guy in the trunk. I kept taking notes about why some worked and others didn’t.
This long tour was to learn what made a successful dealer and car community. After talking to a lot of organizers, we learned more than anything, what not to do. Failure would be way easier than success. Inversion thinking would become out guide. Solve the known problems first. You learn not to pee on an electric fence by watching others. You don’t have to do it yourself. Maybe you do.
With the OC dealership closed, and Cars and Coffee now failed, I had no reason to keep the LP640 in OC, except for the dread of dealing with that silly top. I put my car in temporary storage in OC, until I could figure out what to do next. Without a dealer to host and organize car activities, there was little reason to leave it in Orange County, so I shipped it back to Kirkland where I just moved into my newly finished house.
Exotics on Old Main was over for the season, but a few of us still met at Bella Pastry on a Saturday morning just to chat but we soon drifted away to another breakfast spot and there we’d talk cars every Saturday morning.
In spite of the rumors, there was no connection between Old Main and E@RTC other than it was where Vic and I first met, and where I met a few other car enthusiasts, such as Trevor Cobb who came out to Bella Pastery after Exotics on Old Main was done. In fact we still met at Bella Pastry long after Old Main was done and well into after we started E@RTC. I met a lot of car enthusiasts at that breakfast, Paul Bunn, Thomas Summerfield, Kristian Jaeger, Arny Barer, and others.
I told Vic that if there was to be a successful event, based on what I visited in 2008, it had to have a theme, and it had to have very specific infrastructure, such as restaurants, freeway access, and other ingredients, and without them, every event failed. We couldn’t be a “Cars and Coffee,” so I picked the name “ExoticsAT” because it meant we could hold onto our equity if we moved. It’s why our website is “Exoticsat.com.” We wanted to survive a move, should we have one.
By January of 2009, my car was now in Kirkland, and it was time for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas during that first week. Vic and me, along with John Eltringham, and Michael Greenwood, who was my neighbor in Redmond, all went to CES together. It was while we were sitting at the bar at Scarpetta, one of the best restaurants in Las Vegas, that Vic and I decided to launch E@RTC. That bar is where it really began.
Vic, me John Eltringham and Michael Greenwood, CES January 2009.
As a part of the launch plan, Vic would be responsible for talking to the Ferrari guys, and I’d work on everything else because I had the time and resources to do it along with my two assistants, Limberly Lind and Tiffany (now Washburn) to help out.
Vic was working for Apple and was commuting from Seattle to Silicon Valley every week and didn’t have a lot of time to work on our event, but I had the time and resources to get the thing launched. We agreed from the beginning that I’d put in the most effort given his commute to Apple every week. There was never an expectation that we’d split the effort evenly.
When we returned from CES, Vic and I along with a group of us drove down to Southcenter to attend a car show in the parking lot over by Office Max and it was miserable. It was cold, windy, with one Starbucks, and no ambiance. The police showed up to talk to the tuners and we thought, no, this wouldn’t work. We would have to find something completely new.
We let the car forums know what we were doing and most of the folks were flaming us for a range of issues, from criteria to location, to brands, but a few offered to help, and so we didn’t stop. At one point, Vic and I talked about abandoning the idea because there was so much rage about it.
When I matched the required successful criteria against what was available, Redmond Town Center was obvious, and I knew the place extremely well because it was within walking distance from where I recently lived. I lived in an apartment near downtown Redmond for eleven years and knew the place inside out. It was my recent hangout and it was perfect!
I was also very involved in the speed/distance skating community that skated out of Redmond Town Center to Gasworks Park and I had connections at the mall through the skate school event organizers.
Vic also had a connection through his brother who is an architect, and so together we approached Christina Henning, David Babcock and Jeremiah Judd at Redmond Town Center. We told them that a few of us wanted to meet on a Saturday morning in the farthest corner of the lot and not bother shoppers. We would meet very early in the morning and we’d be long gone before the stores opened.
Christina was beyond enthusiastic along with David and Jeremiah, of Redmond Town Center and it was the three of them who drove the property side of our success. They are the ones who talked us into starting later to overlap with the store openings and we agreed. We wanted to help them. To say that RTC was fantastic is an understatement and without their enthusiastic support we wouldn’t exist, so a huge amount of thanks goes to them. Those three Amigos from RTC are no longer there, but they were critical to our initial success.
We kicked off our first event on a cold February 14, Valentine’s weekend on 2009. Leading up to it, we continued to get a lot of flame posts on Ferrari Chat, 6-Speed Online, LamboPower, and the other local forums. We had no idea what to expect that first day. We kept downplaying it in the forums, an kept saying that we were going to try it out and see how it would work. At the time, the car community was split along brands and this would be the uniting. It could go well or horribly wrong. We didn’t know.
However, what got us through was that initial massive support from Paul Bunn, Scott McClure, Arny Barer, John Eltringham, John Campbell, Jason Tang, Roy Cats, Larry Nguyen, Sid Thayer, John Atzbach, William Howard, Greta Pass, Jody and Todd Takagi, Bruce McLaughlin, and so many others leading up to and on that first day and many still attend.
I’d love to list all the names who were there that first day, as participants and spectators, so please send me the names and I’ll edit this as they were critical to our start. We should have all 32 cars! While we have the photos of the cars that first attended, we don’t have all the drivers.
When we began, it was nearly a full time job responding to all the criticism because we dared to define a car criteria. One guy in Gig Harbor, who I shall not name was relentless at trying to kill the event. He was out to damaged us any way he could and for no reason other than our car criteria and location. We had a lot of keyboard cowboys back then on the forums, and Facebook hadn’t yet caught fire so much of my time was just putting out fires.
In fact, the biggest doubters about our success and the very people who taunted us the most on the forums, can be seen in those first photos standing on the corner on that first and second week, hoping for a confrontation or no-shows when instead it was a success. We persisted. They got over it and joined us.
On that first morning, I didn’t think we’d draw more than a dozen cars and Vic was far more upbeat, and thought we’d draw a lot more cars. I guessed about a dozen or less, Vic guessed about twenty or more, and had a better pulse on the community, and that first Saturday we drew 32 cars and we never looked back.
The original “Thugs” who helped us with those first few events from our first day were Christian Diamond, and Ty Washburn. I later introduced Ty to my assistant Tiffany who was helping out, who later married. They now have two kids- and all because of E@RTC! No they didn’t name their kids “Exotics” and “At” even after I offered a few bucks and some chicky nuggets.
Michael Greenwood, my neighbor, designed our first logo, and that’s how I met Ty. Christian Diamond was an early Thug along with Eric Reeves who was the one who named us the “Thugs” because of all the hate mail we received, and because we directed parking and policed the event. Eric was also one of our first Thugs and a true friend.
That early January, right about the time we attended CES, I was invited to Lamborghini corporate in Italy to have a meeting with the senior team. It was arranged by Rupert Stadler who was CEO of Audi at the time. John Eltringham came with me to the meeting at Lamborghini headquarters just two weeks before we launched E@RTC. That led to my involvement with Manfred Fitzgerald who was Director of Brand and Design at Lamborghini, who would be coming out to kick off the carbon fiber lab at the University of Washington. Manfred went on to launch the Genesis brand spin-off for Hyundai.
We then set up an event and invited the Lamborghini team to coincide with the carbon fiber lab launch. They all came out to E@RTC. I did not have anything to do with the launch of the CF lab other than to broker a relationship with the Lamborghini club and to build a relationship between the lab and E@RTC. Joy Loo came up from the OC car scene to help us with our event, and we were super-grateful for her help.
We hosted a breakfast event at Salish Lodge, complete with a police escort from RTC to Salish Lodge where the senior team gave a presentation about the brand from their point of view. It sold out immediately! This translated into immediate local sales, and that was the cornerstone that legitimized our event, and the rest was just building our brand. That event triggered the sale of more LP67-4 SV than anywhere else. There were originally 5 of the 38 in the Northwest. The hate posts on the forums stopped immediately after that. We were deemed legit.
From left to right: Dominik Hoburg, Manfred Fitzgerald, Maurizio Reggiani, Stephan Winkelmann, me, Tiffany Washburn, Kimberly Lind, Joy Loo and Pietro Frigerio (photo by James Boyer)
Those early years were ultimately very costly both in time and money to get us our foundation. We went on to work on the Carz video and we co-hosted the Carz video party with Sir Mix-A-Lot at what was Desert Fire where BJs now sits.
“Anthony” as we’ve called him, joined us from our second week of E@RTC and his influence and kindness was an important part of our start. He helped kill the stigma between spectator and participant and we’re forever grateful for his help. The Carz video is still on YouTube and in an upcoming blog, I’ll talk about the making of that video.
We still didn’t think we were going to be a real thing, yet it kept growing, so we had people, such as Nelson Yong create and manage our first website and others who pitched in. The behind the scenes efforts started to get complicated and it took even more time and it remained a nearly full time job until 2013. More on that coming up.
If you don’t know if your car meets E@RTC criteria, go here before you write us. Saves us all time. See you all April 1!