Parade of Super Cars Inspires Mixed Feelings



LONDON — With his canary yellow Ferrari at rest in the forecourt of one of the most expensive hotels in London’s upscale West End, its eight-cylinder, race-bred engine burbling, a young Arab man who gave his name as Khalefa spoke with whimsical regret about the array of even faster, more expensive super cars parked nearby that belonged to other young men like himself from the Persian Gulf oil states.

“Me, I only have the Ferrari,” he said. “I am a poor man.”

With Britain still struggling to climb out of recession, and the new governing coalition embarked on a historic campaign of budget austerity, wealthy young men like Khalefa — who declined to give his full name, or his nationality — encounter a conflicted reception when they flee the conservative social mores and the 130-degree heat of the Middle East in high summer to enjoy the cool breezes of millionaires’ row districts of London like Belgravia, Mayfair and Knightsbridge.

On one hand, the young men and their families get an eager welcome in the hotels, department stores, and jewelry and fashion boutiques that rely heavily on the visitors’ wealth in otherwise lean economic times. Many local people, too, at least in London, enjoy the excitement and panache that come with a parade of exotic cars with Arabic license plates from gulf oil states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and, especially, the United Arab Emirates.

But a display of vehicles that rival anything to be seen at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance or Monaco’s Casino Square at Grand Prix time has its downside, too, with residents complaining that some visitors have exploited the easygoing atmosphere of the West End in summer to flout parking regulations and stage what have amounted to races of their own in the deserted streets after midnight, in what one of Britain’s tabloids called the Knightsbridge Grand Prix.

Arab visitors to Britain — more than five million last year, according to official figures — have increased since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, which some Arab commentators say made Arab visitors feel less comfortable in New York.

“Arab people are scared, in a way, of becoming figures in an exhibition, of being associated in some way with what happened in those attacks,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper distributed widely in the Middle East. “They feel the people of London are more tolerant.”

But this year, the display of wealth has been more conspicuous than ever, especially the cars, and it has drawn mixed reviews. The cars are flown and shipped in from the Middle East for a few weeks, then returned home as the end of the European summer approaches, with costs many times what the owners might pay if they leased luxury cars in London. One carrier, the Gulf Agency Company, said it had flown 15 cars to London this summer, at an average cost of about $15,000 one way.

Enthusiasts gather wherever the Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Mercedes-Benz SLRs and Rolls-Royces are parked. Their gulf origins are evident from their license plates; that discretion is not the favored mode is suggested by the customized paint jobs, of silver plate and gold lamé and black matte, and, for Rolls-Royces, bright red or yellow or other arresting color schemes barely imagined when Charles Rolls and Henry Royce began selling their cars to Britain’s aristocratic elite in 1906.

These cars have included several examples of the Mercedes SLR McLaren; a number of French-made Bugatti Veyrons, with 1,000-horsepower engines said to be capable of nearly 270 miles per hour, and a $1.3 million sticker price; and the Italian-made Pagani Zonda Cinque, base price $1 million, that the manufacturers say is so rare that only half a dozen have been sold.

But perhaps the rarest of all is the Swedish-built Koenigsegg CCXR, retailing at $1.9 million and said by its manufacturers to be the world’s first “green” super car, capable of achieving speeds of 250 miles an hour on biofuel. A powder-blue Koenigsegg became an inadvertent icon for the super car invasion when, together with a similarly painted Lamborghini Murcielago, it was “clamped” by parking wardens — in American terms, immobilized by having a steel “boot” locked to one of its front wheels — outside Harrods department store last month.

The cars’ owners, members of the royal family of Qatar, bought the store in May for $2.2 billion from Mohamed al-Fayed, the 77-year-old Egyptian-born entrepreneur whose son, Dodi, died in a Paris car crash in 1997 with Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps they believed that a parking space should have come along with the purchase.

For many gulf visitors, clamping has become a hazard of the summer, only partly because of what the wardens have described as their carelessness about parking restrictions. Traffic cameras and handheld computers used by the traffic police cannot handle Arabic script, so a clamp sometimes becomes the only way to enforce a parking penalty or to assure that violators are brought to justice.

With the arrival of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, many of the super cars began disappearing last week. But the end-of-season mood was punctured by a spectacular crash last month in the heart of Knightsbridge.

Two wealthy young men from Abu Dhabi were arrested after a Lamborghini spun out of control on a dash around a square shortly before 2 a.m., wrecking four other expensive vehicles, one of them a BMW that was flipped over by the impact. Witnesses were quoted in The Evening Standard as saying that one of the men called out as he walked away from the impact, saying, “It’s all right, we’ll pay for the damage.”

It is not only the British who have cringed at the flamboyant excesses of some of the visitors. Mr. Atwan, the newspaper editor, described the “show off” behavior of the young super car owners as “very annoying and very provoking, and not only to the British, but other Arabs.”

Nevertheless, he said, it would be a mistake to condemn all the young Arab men for the actions of a few. He said he was sitting at a Knightsbridge traffic light in his middle-market family sedan recently when a yellow Ferrari pulled up alongside him with its engine growling.

“I rolled down my window to say something to him before the light changed, expecting him to rev his engine and zoom away,” Mr. Atwan said. “But then I decided to be polite, and said, ‘What a nice car! Good luck!’ and do you know what? He pulled away very quietly, waving his hand to say goodbye. He couldn’t have been more polite.”