Collector of European sports cars houses them inside Garage Mahal

Around the dusty-pink Mediterranean-style home in Richmond's historic Bellevue neighborhood, only faint traffic sounds could be heard from Interstate 95 a few blocks away.

A man walked his cocker spaniel. Squirrels skittered across dead brown leaves under a massive magnolia tree.

Suddenly, the suburban quiet was shattered by a low rumble that built into a thundering roar. From behind the sedate 1920s stucco house, a fiery red 1979 Porsche 911 SC Euro Coupe convertible exploded down the driveway, paused briefly at the sidewalk and veered left down the street with tires squealing and engine revved to a high-pitched scream.

Chris Champeau, a mild-mannered Dell computer engineer, was taking a little afternoon outing.

As the car launched off a ramp toward the Powhite Parkway, effortlessly shifting from lane to lane, heads turned in almost every vehicle. The needle on the speedometer inched toward 80.

"Do you ever get tickets?" Champeau was asked.

"Oh yeah," he shouted over the roar of the wind.

After a 10-minute joyride, he returned home, parked the Porsche and hopped into a bronze 1984 Jaguar XJ-SC Cabriolet right-hand drive convertible and made the same circuit. Back home again, he plopped on a chauffeur's cap and repeated the jaunt at a more leisurely pace in a red-over-black 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, his passenger in the back seat behind a glass partition.

Boy toys? No. Mid-life crisis mobiles? Hardly.

"It's a hobby that's grown and gotten totally out of control," said Champeau, clad in black jeans, a Jaguar-logo golf shirt and sunglasses. "Psycho. I'm constantly looking for others."

Champeau, 52, has surpassed the collection phase and entered fleet status. His classic European sports cars -- "works of art," he says -- are housed inside a 30-by-40-foot garage, an architecturally appropriate behemoth with mechanized lifts that make it a double-decker with a capacity for 10 cars.

He owns 16, with a total estimated value between $235,000 and $265,000. He has bought, restored and sold countless others.

Thirteen of his cars are Euro-classics. The other three are "ordinary" vehicles used for work, grocery runs and other mundane journeys.

Several of Champeau's prized vehicles will be on display at Sunday's 25th annual Classics on the James European car show on Brown's Island, sponsored by the Central Virginia British Car Club. The event attracts thousands of collectors and spectators from all over the East Coast.

Champeau has untold numbers of fellow car geeks whose collections lurk behind hedges and homes and in unmarked storage facilities all over the Richmond area. One or two live in his neighborhood.

One fairly notorious local guy has 40 cars and two garages. "People are secretive about it," noted Kevin Allocca, a member of the Central Virginia club since 1989 and its special events coordinator. Allocca's passion is MGs, marquee car of this year's show -- his prize being a 1934 MG PA that's only 3½ feet wide.

Zoning restrictions, security concerns and neighbor relations can be ticklish for car collectors. Champeau's Garage Mahal, as it's nicknamed, replaced an otherwise sizable three-car unit that came with the house Champeau and his wife, Ingrid Olson, bought and restored 10 years ago. He doesn't want to publicize the cost of the expanded version.

He owned five classics at the time, but was keeping them in a Fan District storage facility. In constructing the garage, he crashed head-on into some issues with the City of Richmond over its hefty footprint on the lot. He also ran into a jam with the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act because of a small creek a block away.

The couple crafted the facility's dimensions to the satisfaction of City Hall and hired a hydro engineer to install a drainage system to collect potential runoff water from the garage. They also won over a concerned neighbor, since moved, who confronted their contractor during construction and complained about a "car museum" being built behind his property. Champeau is in good company; similar sticking points dogged comedian Jerry Seinfeld for two years as he had a 20-car garage/gallery built in Manhattan for his Porsche collection.

Champeau believes in maintaining a garage rather than a museum. He drives each car at least once a month. He is a full-blown tinkerer, with mechanic-style stations upstairs and down, racks of tires, a vintage gas pump and numerous tools. He does much of the restoration work himself, particularly upholstery, and used to do paint jobs until auto paints became too toxic to use in spaces that aren't professionally ventilated.

He says it's more expensive to insure his 1997 Nissan Maxima than the $75,000 Porsche coupe because the Maxima is driven so much more.

By far his most unusual classic, parked by his garage where it's visible from the street, is a 1962 Mercedes-Benz Unimog, a troop carrier he imported from Switzerland when he needed a truck. He ended up buying and selling several of the vehicles, which resemble jeeps on steroids. "Before we had the garage, we had three Unimogs," Olson said. "I think the neighbors were scared of us."

On special occasions, Champeau fires up the troop transport and piles friends into the back bed, which has two fold-down benches that can seat 14. "We've had some real fun with it," Champeau said. "One night, we took a bunch of friends down to Havana [59 restaurant], dropped the back down and everybody piled out. People thought it was the Bay of Pigs all over again."

Champeau spent part of his childhood in Europe, breeding ground of his Euro-car fascination -- where Jaguar is pronounced "Jag-U-ah." His first car was a Volkswagen Beetle.

Later, he got into MGs and has had about 30 of those through the years.

The great enabler of most collectors these days is eBay, and it's no different for Champeau. He found most of his magnificent machines on the auction site.

"God bless the Internet," he said, scanning four of his treasures parked in a row on his front lawn. "It's made this hobby affordable as well as not so challenging."

Contact Julie Young at (804) 649-6732 or .