Destinations editor Eric Moya spoke with David Perisset, who co-founded Exotics Racing in Las Vegas in 2009 with Romain Thievin.
Q: Most of the time, do customers know what car they want? Are they open to your instructors' recommendations?
David Perisset
A: Ferraris and Lamborghinis represent about 70% of our sales; that's why we have up to seven of each model, to accommodate demand.
Most people know which car they want to try: If they want to test-drive the car of their dreams before they buy [one], they will be very specific. If they just want to get better at driving, they will focus on a very track-oriented car, like the Porsche GT3.
Q: How do you choose the types of cars to offer? How are they maintained?
A: You have the must-haves, which are the Lamborghinis, the Ferraris. But then we listen to our customers. We ask our clients to tell us if there's a car they want; that's how we got the Nissan GT-R. Our clients were asking for it all the time, so we ended up buying one, then two, and today I think we have four or five of them.
We have a full-on repair shop in which we do very high-level mechanical repairs, probably one of the most sophisticated shops you can find in this country.
Q: Are a lot of your customers interested in particular cars because of movies or video games, or are they mostly serious drivers?
A: That's the big difficulty of our job, and especially our instructors. When they have somebody getting in a car, they have to keep them safe and let them have a great experience. But they don't know until they get on track what they're capable of. So you have all the possible scenarios. You have people who just want to enjoy the car, they just want to experience these cars in a safe environment. They come, they drive the car of their dreams and they're not necessarily competitive.
Then there are really competitive guys who don't care about the cars themselves, they just want to be fast. And it's for those types of people that we recently launched the EXR Series, a true wheel-to-wheel racing championship with pure, purpose-built race cars. The goal for us is to address the wish of our customers who have come three, four, maybe 10 times and they get better and better and they start becoming competitive.