I was organizing all my photos the other day and found the pics from Ben and I’d Dubai trip, way back in 2009. It all got lost in the frenzy that was moving Downshift from its old Blogspot URL to a proper domain. At first, I thought I would just let it slide; it seems like it was too long ago for me to post it now, but after going through the old pictures I realised that was a stupid idea.
We were in Dubai from July 4th ’til the 24th – totally spur of the moment. Dubai has always been know for its eccentric spending, and that is totally, totally evident when you’re simply walking down the street. Driving down the highway, fresh from the airport, exotic cars kept coming out of nowhere. The best welcome I’ve ever had to a country; we spotted an incredibly bright yellow Enzo at a dealership within 15 minutes. Unlike in Australia, the dealerships in Dubai are scattered with some exotica; the first dealer on the strip possessed both a certain prancing horse and a quite famous trident.
You guessed correct – Ferrari and Maserati. As soon as we walked in we were greeted by this silver F430 Spider. The way this dealership was layed out was pretty cool in itself; both Ferrari and Maserati were in the same building, but they had a split in the middle where the cars drove in and out of the workshop.
This 599 was a very cool way to show off the colour palette that customers can choose from.
Easily the best car in the Ferrari dealer, the standard F430 doesn’t even have legs to stand on when next to the Scuderia. Such a badass car.
We headed over to the Maserati section, which was much smaller. Straight away we spotted this parked in the holding area, waiting for its owner to pick it up. Back in ’09 the California was basically brand spanking new, so it was awesome to see.
The Quattroporte’s are unbelievably popular in Dubai – they are everywhere. Not hard to see why, either.
Next stop was the big blue oval, which had a lot less quality cars, so we didn’t spend too much time there.
Unforunately Ford only had one awesome car on show, a black GT500.
Then we made our way over to Mercedes and Nissan. Unfortunately, Mercedes was basically impossible to take pictures in; the dealership had poor lighting and way too many window panes. Nissan only had one car we were interested in at the time – the GTR was brand new and this was one of the first ones we had ever seen.
Only car I could get a pic of, the flagship model. Bi Turbo V12 is all the business, price tag was frankly all business as well.
We then had to spend a few hours looking, but finally found a Vantage Convertible and Gallardo – we knew they’d be outisde of an exotic specialist dealer. It also turned out that the dealership only had brand new cars!
As you can see exotics are a very, very common sight over in Dubai. This picture had a GT500, a Bentley Continental GT, Range Rover SuperSport, BMW 750i and a Alfa Romeo Brera Cabriolet – spot them all?
Inside was even better…
This is 1 of the 399 Enzo’s ever made. The Enzo may not be as competitive or as fast as the Ferrari’s being released to date, but no modern Ferrari can hold as much presence as the Enzo; it sits there looking at you with such a godlike presence. What is even more amazing is just how rare this yellow one would be since over half the 399 made were red, with the next most common colours being black and white. Yellow was the second rarest, beaten by the blue; there were only 5 blue ones built. Fun facts; Jay Kay (the lead singer of Jamiroqai), Pharrell Williams and Jay Leno (talk show host) all own blue Enzo’s.