Netjets US Autumn 2022

From Red Bull to Ferrari to Lotus, Dany Bahar has been a force for
change in the automotive world, and yet his coachbuilding company,
Ares, may be his most ambitious undertaking. // By Josh Sims
ONE
OF A KIND
YOU CAN IMAGINE the look on his face. A Saudi prince is the proud
owner of a $2.5 million Bugatti. He’s enjoying lunch in Monaco.
And then guess what pulls up outside the restaurant? A virtually
identical $2.5 milllion Bugatti. Fortunately, Dany Bahar was there
to provide a solution.
“He looks at me and just tosses the car keys across the table
and tells me to do whatever I need to do to make his car unique,”
recalls Bahar. In doing so, he became Bahar’s first customer. And
a rather good one, as he has since put a “double-digit number” of
cars a year through the entrepreneur’s services.
“If he hadn’t seen that other Bugatti maybe it would never have
occurred to him just how much he actually wanted something
unique—that what is, in most cases, the pure, theoretical idea that
someone else just might be able to buy the same vehicle as him [is
enough of an incentive to pursue that individuality],” Bahar adds.
What Bahar does, through his Modena, Italy-based company
Ares, which he co-founded with business consultant Waleed Al
Ghafari just eight years ago, is take a vehicle and remodel it as
a true one-off. Clients come with their seemingly run-of-the-mill
Ferrari, Bentley, or Rolls-Royce—automobiles that, in the more
everyday world, would already be considered extremely special—
and often with specific ideas as to how to make it utterly special.
That might amount to a reworked interior scheme or it might
involve something much more fundamental: turning a sedan into a
coupe, for example, converting a fixed roof into a convertible one,
or changing the entire profile of the vehicle.
“Actually I’m not really a car guy myself, not a petrolhead,”
says Bahar, who nonetheless spent a couple years at Ferrari as its
senior vice president for commercial and brand before leaving—
something hardly anyone at Ferrari ever does—to become CEO of
Lotus. Perhaps he is, at heart, more of a brand-builder: He made
his name in the business world with considerably smaller wheels,
helping to make inline skating the global phenomenon, if a fleeting
one, that it became, before moving on to Red Bull, where, as
its chief operating officer for four years, he was instrumental in
launching its Formula One racing team.
“What I learned [from both experiences] was how important
emotional content is to any product, how powerful that can be,”
enthuses Bahar, who’s more an ice-hockey player than an inline
skater, and who, one imagines, has enough get-up-and-go in his
veins to bypass energy drinks. But perhaps both brands attuned
him to the needs of younger people—and what the “Me Generation”
wants, more and more, is something that’s all about them.
Indeed, the falling age profile of the very wealthy isn’t something
all manufacturers of luxury products have yet grasped, he contends.
It was Bahar who battled with Ferrari’s dominant engineering
culture to get the company to launch vehicles that worked with
the lifestyle needs of the young and wealthy, not just to provide
excellence in mechanics.
“Ferrari was becoming an old man’s car, an attribute that
[younger consumers] wouldn’t want to be associated with. I
think I was able to change that a lot while I was there, and
start to do some really cool things,” says Bahar, a Turkish-born
Swiss, now based in Dubai. “But I also met so much resistance
to that idea. I remember having this 1.5-hour-long meeting with
the CEO, who’s a dear friend, and at the end he said ‘Dany,
I didn’t understand anything you said, but it sounded good.’”
He continues: “To give a stupid example, it was as simple as
putting in cup-holders. Ferrari saw no engineering reason to
have them. But even a Ferrari needs a cupholder. The Ferrari
California was the first ever Ferrari for which the initial briefing
came from the commercial department, which had an eye to
fulfilling the needs of the customer [not finding a customer to
meet whatever the company built].”
And there are more and more of these customers, a new
demographic for whom lifestyle concerns are paramount, and,
increasingly, customization is king. That, Bahar concedes, is not
an original idea per se. “Modding” is now well-established within
the watch world, and luxury car makers, Ferrari included, have
long run programs that allow buyers to select, say, a particular
paintwork finish or seating leather. Many high-end car makers
also have decades-long relationships with famed coachbuilders
like Pininfarina or Zagato, each bringing their vision to exceptional
versions of production vehicles.
What’s new, arguably, is elevating it to the Ares level: The
customer ends up with their Bugatti looking like no other, complete
with all road-worthiness certifications and registrations. And
that’s possible because Ares will do what the bigger names of
the luxury automotive world could do—on paper—but can’t or
won’t do in actuality because the necessary disruption to their
production processes is just too costly and too complex. These
massive companies will, Bahar reckons, only ever be able to offer
CHANGING MINDS
Dany Bahar’s Ares is setting new
standards for customized vehicles.
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