China's new super-rich are splurging on super-fast super-cars - but keep it quiet.
Sports Car Club drivers line up on the grid Image: MinistryofTofu |
According to Zhang Kuan, the 32 year old founder of China's Sports Car Club (SCC recent scandals involving affluent Chinese - most notoriously the Red Cross Guo Meimei story - have made many of the Chinese nouveau riche nervous about flaunting their wealth. So where do the young and the rich go to show off?
The SIC Club Challenge at the Shanghai International Circuit is the biggest supercar gathering in China provides the perfect solution for those not wanting to draw too much attention.
Starting with just a handful of members and a few million yuan-worth of sports cars, the SCC now has over 500 members from all around the country. Though the club started from humble beginnings where anyone with a BMW M3 could join, the bar has since been raised and now only a Porshe 911 or above will do.
“Buying a sports car is not as hard as people have thought”, according to Zhang, as one can simply “buy a sports car with the money that others would've used for an investment in the real estate market.” The cheapest supercars can be bought for as little as 1.2 million yuan ($185,000) in China, although the real high-performance show-stoppers are priced around 4 to 5 million yuan ($620,000 to $770,000).