SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THESE
HE BREN GARAGE IS WHY I GOT ON to Instagram. “Want to check out the first 911 R in the country?”, asked my good friend Manik Bhardwaj when I dropped in at Racetech in Bangalore three years ago. Racetech is the flying doctor for the majority of sportscars and supercars in the country and an avid user of Instagram. I’d just spent the last hour telling him how the smart guys, the people who read, the people who write, are all on Twitter while Instagram is for the, erm, the Arabs.
“So it is safe to assume you haven’t heard of the Bren Garage,” countered Manik.
I had not.
And I could not believe what Manik showed me on the @BrenGarage Instagram feed. “All of this is in India! In Bangalore!” yelled Manik before we jumped into his car to trek across Bangalore to meet Boopesh Reddy to check out the first and only 911 R in India.
What followed blew me away. Outside his lovely home in Bangalore was an Evo X with a dustbin-sized exhaust. “That’s not his,” said Manik. “That’s not Bren Garage material.” You’d usually dismiss that as crazy talk except the basement garage was unlike anything else I’d seen in India. Now remember I was here to check out the 911 R, the 2016 evo Car of the Year but parked alongside was the Ferrari 458 Italia and Cayman GT4, the 2014 and 2015 evo Cars of the year. Three eCOTY winners, together. What a story that turned out to be.
“I remember, it was the first article of mine ever in a magazine,” says Boopesh when I caught up with him, virtually, on the #evoConversations Instagram Live session during the lockdown. “Those are memories which I carry with me. I still have the magazine, about 8-10 copies with me.”
Since then the Bren Garage has been in the pages of evo India quite a few times, and thrice on the cover. The first was when we gathered together five limited edition Porsches at the MMRT race track — Boopesh drove down in his TechArt GT Street R based on the 911 Turbo S while for the story he let us have the GT4 and the 911 R. A year later I took an early morning flight to Bangalore and caught up with him waiting outside the airport with the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, the first in the country. And the third time was the craziest, when we took the 488 Pista to the Rann of Kutch — where we didn’t just do static shots but Boopesh