When fears of a global coronavirus pandemic ground the world to a halt earlier this year, many automotive enthusiasts discovered that the empty roads provided a perfect opportunity to social distance behind the wheel of their favorite cars. While mainstays on the automotive calendar like the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance may have been canceled, local clubs and meetups like Cars and Coffee events only grew in popularity.
The resulting spike in speeding tickets hasn't appeared to dim the excitement in the automotive landscape, either, and Hagerty's VP of Valuation Services recently told me that attainable collector cars being sold on the secondhand market below $50,000 have only ballooned in popularity, even as famous auctions and official events have been canceled.
Auction houses like Mecum, Barrett-Jackson, and RM Sotheby's have increasingly turned to online formats in response, while popular museums have also introduced streaming videos like the Petersen Car Week and the Mullin Museum's Docent Tour series to keep their audiences engaged. One such series has emerged from The Brumos Collection, a new automotive mecca that opened earlier this year in Florida offering an insider view at legendary Porsches, Peugeots, Millers, and even a stripped-to-the-nuts 1925 Bugatti Type 35.
I recently spoke with The Brumos Collection's Executive Director Brandon Starks about living the dream life while quarantining inside a museum jam-packed with some of the world's greatest cars.
Brandon Starks, Executive Director of The Brumos Collection
Starks first entered the Brumos orbit in 2010, when he took over as sales manager of the Brumos Porsche dealership in Jacksonville, Florida, after beginning his career in automotive retail with Lexus in 2005. When the dealership's owner, former Winn-Dixie chairman Dan Davis, sold the retail operation, Starks continued his position as general manager of the rebranded Porsche Jacksonville. But Davis hadn't given up the rights to the Brumos name as part of the deal, nor the dealership's extensive car collection, which had become something of an unkept secret in Florida's automotive circles.
The Brumos Collection in its current guise can trace its lineage all the way back to 1953, when Hubert Brundage founded Brundage Motors as a Volkswagen importer. Brundage Motors was shortened to Brumos and Brumos began selling Porsches before Brundage's untimely death in 1964, at which point racer Peter Gregg acquired the company. Gregg would lead Brumos to motorsport fame with partner Hurley Haywood, the duo winning their first of the Brumos Racing team's four 24 Hours of Daytona victories driving a Porsche 917-10 in 1973.
Gregg's wife, Deborah, took over next, eventually selling to Davis and Bob Snodgrass in 1990. After Snodgrass passed away in 2007, Davis acquired full control of the Brumos name, dealership, and racing team, spearheading a return to competition and notching a Grand-Am GT Championship in 2011. Brumos would exit the racing scene in 2013 and Davis sold the dealership in 2016, leaving him in control of the Brumos name and legacy, as well as the lineup of historically significant cars that would eventually serve as the foundation for the official opening of The Brumos Collection in January of 2020. But he first tapped Starks to help with the public debut.
“Davis was about a year out from opening this facility and asked me if I’d be interested in joining him launching a new car museum," Starks told me. "Although, we didn’t call it a museum. I said, 'Yes,' taking what I’d learned at the dealership and learning on the fly. And that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Launching A New Location
Of course, the first month of the 2020 calendar year could never foretell a year chock-full full of unexpected surprises. For Starks and The Brumos Collection, the newly opened facility averaged about 125 visitors per day, three days a week, before the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance in early March, when attendance peaked at around 350 guests per day. And with attractions like the Porsche 917K that starred alongside Steve McQueen in his 1971 passion project Le Mans, the largest collection of Miller racecars on the planet, open-wheeled Bugattis and Peugeots, and more, The Brumos Collection looked to be on the up-and-up.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic locked everything down, leaving Starks with a collection of about 65 cars and no guests to welcome into his sparkling new facility, which is comprised of 35,000 square feet under roof including 16,000 square feet of display space, a full workshop (including an engine dynamometer), a small theater, a mezzanine, two catering kitchens, and a conference room.
“The building itself is purpose-built for this... We needed a place to put the collection and one of the places that we looked at was a Ford assembly plant in downtown Jacksonville," Starks said. "The owner just loved the architecture but it was too far gone and way too big. So he hired an architect to design a new collection building, which is what we’re in now. But it was designed inspired by our local Ford assembly plant.”
Adapting To The New World Order
As the prospect of an extended pandemic exacerbated by a muddled political and public response resolved into reality, The Brumos Collection has adapted, much like the Petersen and Mullin museums, with a video series titled "Inside The 59" offering an inside look at the incredible cars that make up the collection.
The most recent clip features an iconic Bugatti Type 35 being stripped to nuts and bolts, then reassembled into pristine, highly original condition. I asked Starks how the crew at Brumos went from managing a car collection to actually wrenching on one of the most historically significant cars of all time.
“It really is a funny world we live in, especially with Covid, because it’s basically just been the five of us," he explained. "We’re all kind of isolated here with our cars in our own little world. We all realize we have great jobs and when you work in this environment, we have running jokes with each other where it’s amazing what becomes normal to you when you’re around it all day.”
Specifically, though, the Bugatti restoration began, as so many car projects do, with an oil change. But the car's backstory, which is largely left out of the video, lends drama to the goings-on.
"When our car was originally purchased, it was a guy named Wallis Bird," Starks recounted. "He was an heir in the northeast. While he was on his honeymoon in Paris, his wife went to buy lingerie and he went to check out the Bugatti showroom—and we actually still have the receipt for the lingerie with the car. But he brought it home and used it as a daily driver. It was only raced once, sixteen years after it was new. So the car’s super-duper original.”
“We just started with an oil change, and the engine wasn’t running quite right. So we sent it out to be gone through. In order to get the engine out, we took the bodywork off. And that’s when we started seeing traces of the blue that was the original blue of the car. And so we made the choice to return it to its original color. Other than that, everything we did was to try to maintain the originality of things—maybe repair parts and clean or lubricate them, but not alter or replace them. And that’s, sometimes, harder to do.”
On The Docket: Restoring Helmuth Bott's Porsche 959 Prototype
Watching the video, I spied a Porsche 959 on a lift in the background of the workshop where the Bugatti Type 35 was stripped and reassembled. Starks was able to reveal that the 959 will star in the next video from Brumos, expected release date January 2021, and that this was yet another project that began with a simple service in mind.
"Our 959 was actually the last of the prototype cars before they went into production. It was [Porsche Director of Development] Helmuth Bott’s personal road car, so he would drive the car for his own R&D purposes... One of the things that Helmuth Bott installed on the car was catalytic converters. And so, we had an exhaust system that had cats and they burned really hot. The car wasn't necessarily running right. So that started with the oil change service and then we decided to order a factory exhaust—and save the original—so that we could get the car out and drive it.”
These two extensive projects, the latter of which Starks admitted involved calling up Bruce Canepa looking for lug nuts as the famous 959 expert was facing California wildfires with 50-gallon drums of water on his roof, represent a major priority for Starks and The Brumos Collection. "All of our cars run, and that’s kind of really important to us," he said. "Like with anything, there’s always something unexpected. It’s a constant job of keeping them up and running."
To that end, two seasoned technicians work full-time at the facility. Collection Manager Don Leatherwood began his career with Brumos Racing in the 1980s and has had to learn how to wrench on everything from an early 1953 Porsche 356 Pre-A coupe to the uniquely engineered Millers. Assistant Collection Manager Aaron Israel, meanwhile, has a degree in collection management from McPherson College in Kansas and can be seen doing the lion's share of work in the Bugatti video.
Picking A Favorite
As for Starks, I asked what his favorite car in the collection might be.
“That’s like picking a favorite child," he replied. "It’s hard to say. I love our 550 Spyder. For whatever reason, I have an emotional connection to that one. And our Peugeot L45 is next to it, kind of emotionally. It’s hard to say which one is the favorite, but those two make me feel good when I see them.”
In Starks's mind, The Brumos Collection exists to deliver that same emotional connection to the public—right now, videos will have to suffice, but he's hoping to get things back up and running soon. "Right now, our plan is to reopen in January, tentatively. We’re trying for before the 24 hours of Daytona... As the world gets back to normal, we’ll increase capacity and then hopefully start doing car shows and things like that. We wanted to do May 9 [5/9], which is our racing number. But I think we’ll do May 8th so we don’t interrupt Mother’s Day, to get a lot of the cars out and run them around the parking lot with bleachers, to let people experience them and see them in motion.”
When The Brumos Collection does reopen, visitors can expect even more of an insider look than was, perhaps, originally conceived. Each of the 40 cars on display has received its own digital kiosk, while workshop tours may also get added to the docket so that guests can see for themselves what it takes to keep the cars, some of which were built over a century ago, in excellent running condition.
"We get asked that question a lot, if they run. But it’s not just as simple as turning a key.”
Bringing History To Life
A self-proclaimed "racing fanatic," Starks' passion for cars shines through as he discusses his unusual automotive life. He dailies a pickup truck but told me, "I do have a [Cayman] GT4, which is my Porsche. When I worked at the dealership, I got a demo and I could drive whatever mood I was in or whatever I wanted to do. But when I had to pick one, that was a little trickier."
From pickup trucks to modern Porsches, from an 1894 Peugeot that raced in the first-ever sanctioned automobile race between Paris and Rouen to Miller board-track racing and everything in between, The Brumos Collection sounds like a gearhead's promised land—and Starks gets to work there every day with his team. But he doesn't let the contrast between the inside and outside worlds get to his head, even during the isolating Covid-19 months that have made up the majority of 2020.
“The number one thing that, if I had a thought that I want to share with people," he said, "What I want enthusiasts to keep in mind, is that you can be passionate and knowledgeable about cars, but still be welcoming and approachable. I encourage anyone who loves cars or is passionate about them to share that passion genuinely, rather than it becoming a trivia contest.”
Sources: thebrumoscollection.com, youtube.com, porschejacksonville.com, abd mcpherson.edu.