IF maturity comes with adventure, the wine in Srecko Lorbek’s living room deserves to be a font of wisdom; hell, it deserves to be in a Bond movie. Crushed and oaked in a 1500-year-old Tuscan town, the Rosso Fanetti was rolled in five-litre bottles down the mountainside by Lorbek, who loved it and had to possess it. Then the wild ride began.
‘‘We put them in the bonnet of our Ferrari and drove them all around Europe – at 200km an hour,’’ the luxury car dealer recalls. The Ferrari tore up the Fiorano circuit, then zoomed off to Monaco where Lorbek met racing champion Niki Lauda and visited the Casino de Paris, where valets parked the Ferrari with rare beasts such as the Bugatti Veyron.
The Ferrari’s return ticket to Melbourne cost $15,000, and its booty bumped up the price a little more. ‘‘When we came back to Australia the duty on the bottles cost more than the wine cost to buy,’’ Lorbek says. ‘‘It was worth it. We opened one a few weeks ago and drank it between 16 of us.’’
Drank it, indeed, against the spectacular backdrop of Albert Park Lake, the city and the great sweeping arc of the bay as seen from Lorbek’s sparkling Albert Park eyrie on the 15th floor. Among the quaffers were elite revheads who visit Lorbek’s Port Melbourne showroom to discreetly trade their Porsches, Lamborghinis and Rollers. The most expensive car on Lorbek Luxury Cars’ books – a Ferrari 458 Italia, at $549,900 – is also, in his opinion, the sexiest car of all time. ‘‘And I have one.’’
Car nirvana? It must be, given that he began his career with a $150 Volkswagen. It was 1980, and the mechanic from Mount Gambier had just landed in Melbourne to open a repair workshop. He loved cars, all cars, but as word spread about his nimble fingers, prestige lovelies were offered up to his tender touch and connoisseurs relied on him as a matchmaker.
Even now, as a leading dealer of classic cars, there’s no swagger about Lorbek; he appreciates what hard work has earned him. Better still when it comes with a built-in joke. A chandelier like a crystal jellyfish, which he bought in St Tropez, is hung just where a mirror bounces its image onto a window, which bounces it back, and so on ‘‘so you see about 60 chandeliers at night!’’.
His pad is the place to see formula one in action. ‘‘I’ve had people licking the glass on grand prix weekend,’’ Lorbek says. His favourite vantage point is a black leather chair, one of a few treasures he kept when he traded an Eltham estate for this abode 12 years ago.
‘‘I walked in and opened the venetians and I could see all the grand prix track and the bay. And I bought it on the spot. Then I bought the one next door,’’ he says. He now has one huge pad and verdant visions of parklands east and west. ‘‘So, I still have all my greenery but I don’t have to maintain it.’’
At work, he’s well-placed to judge if particular makes and models attract certain types of people. ‘‘Absolutely. We will have a client who inquires about a car, and we have not met them; they walk in and you can instantly tell which car they have come to look at,’’ he says.
Lorbek’s passion seems to have dealt him just one frustration: the Australian speed limit.
‘‘Unfortunately the only place I can make full use of my Ferrari is in Europe on the race track or autobahns, where the police actually wave and smile at you and give you the thumbs-up,’’ he says. ‘‘They love it, provided you are not driving dangerously. I feel safer at 220km on the autobahn than at 100 on the Hume Freeway.’’
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