THERMAL CLUB
WANT TO 'EAT, SLEEP, RACE, REPEAT'? THIS COUNTRY CLUB HAS YOU COVERED
Where people with perfect teeth live on a beautiful race track. #fml
YOU’D LIKE Tim Rogers. As the 66-year old accumulated his first fortune, from buying in fuel and selling and distributing it to 7-Eleven stores around America, he and his wife, Twanna, dreamed big. Sitting in bed one morning, drinking the first coffee of the day and peering through the window at the perfectly manicured garden of their country club villa, they imagined a members club for those who found California’s existing country club scene rather pedestrian.
Just like the hundred-plus country clubs dotted around the desertscape of the Coachella Valley, at Tim and Twanna’s imagined club, members would be able to rub shoulders with like-minded, high-flying individuals or retire to their multi-million dollar luxury villa. However, the sound of a driver striking a ball would be replaced by the sound of drivers firing up V12s, twinturbo V8s and flat-sixes, and the fairway would be swapped for the straightaway.
After selling a chunk of gas stations and convenience stores, team Rogers set to work on making their dream come true.
They joined forces with an upmarket property developer and personally funded the creation of the Thermal Club, to the tune of US$175m.
And now here I am, lying in bed with my first coffee of the day, peering out of floor-to-ceiling glass doors, admiring the perfectly presented racing circuit directly below the private terrace. An app tells me who is on track, what they’re driving and how quick, or not, the lap times are. Downstairs, seen through a viewing window in the kitchen, sits a fleet of fifteen desirable sports cars waiting for me to climb aboard. All I have to do is pull on a race suit and within a minute or two I could be trading lap times with my neighbours.
I hop off the bed and slip my shoes back on, straighten the bed covers of the show home and slide shut the doors to the terrace. I’d gladly make myself at home but a prospective purchaser is coming to view the villa later in the day.
It’s surreal to think that before the Thermal Club sprung from the desert in 2012, this place was dust and palm trees as far as the eye could see. A dizzying 14,000 of the palms in the facility had to be relocated, before work could commence. Yet Tim Rogers tells me it has been profitable for the past six years, and doesn’t have a dime of debt.
Even so, it was a risk. Why take on such a project? “The main reason is we belonged to several country clubs,” says Rogers, “and they’re beautiful, with a golf course around you, nice homes, and a common interest with the people near you. But we have maybe 125 of those in the Coachella Valley, and not everyone golfs. We love cars, and thought there are many other people who do too.”
So like Ray Kinsella, in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, they figured that if they built it, millionaire petrolheads would come. Sure enough, they did.
Rolling off the freeway, Thermal Raceway appears like a mirage in the California desert. The site covers around 160 hectares, walled off to the outside world. On the other side of the road is a private airport. The majority of the people that come to Thermal don’t travel by car – this is Fortune 500 territory, after all. They land their Boeing Business Jet, Learjet or helicopter.
You can’t be a member of Thermal Club without building a villa, or vice versa, so you have to either buy a building plot, starting from US$620,000, and build your villa within five years, or you can buy a completed spec villa, from about US$3.3m for a 669 square metre on-track house, or US$2.3m for a 418 square metre off-track property.
At this country club, the sound of a driver striking a ball is replaced by drivers firing up V12s and V8s