Paradise for car spotters

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Spyder Dobrofsky, his younger brother and four friends tumbled out of his mother's Ford Explorer on a recent Sunday morning in Beverly Hills, sprinting down Rodeo Drive with video cameras in hand.

They were on a reconnaissance mission, and it didn't take them long to find what they were looking for.

"Oh, Turbo! Porsche 911 Turbo!" said Spyder, 14, lifting his camera to film the sports car.

Then another boy shouted from behind, "Bentley! Bentley! Flying Spur!"

Before they could capture the four-door luxury sedan, another member of the team spotted a dark-gray Aston Martin Vanquish.

The gangly boys in baggy T-shirts and matching buzz cuts ran to follow the $240,000 car and found it parked on Rodeo Drive outside a store.

They surrounded the vehicle, each boy holding a different palm-sized camera. In total silence, they paced around the automobile, bending down to catch the car's grille, its rims, the lights and even the winged emblem on the hood signifying the famed British automobile maker.

At that moment, the car's owner — a young man in dark sunglasses and a white polo shirt — came across the scene. After a quick double take, Jacob Abikzer, 31, smiled, and the boys continued their filming as if he wasn't there.

"They remind me of myself when I was their age," Abikzer said.

Spyder and his young cohorts have become leading chroniclers of West L.A.'s exotic-car world. Here, the finest European sports cars — Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches — can be found in abundance, thanks to a critical mass of celebrity, glitz and free-spending men in the throes of midlife crises.

Some of them cost more than $1 million, and that's only if you're lucky enough to make it to the top of a waiting list.

For most car watchers, the hobby is about snapping a few photos with their cellphone cameras. But Spyder and his friends shoot videos and post them on such car-watching Web sites as www.exoticspotter.com and www.streetfire.net where enthusiasts offer their latest sighting of a $1.4-million Bugatti Veyron.

Until recently, the exploits of Spyder and his crew were only known within the world of car-spotters, where they have many admirers.

But in February, Swedish businessman Bo Stefan Eriksson crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo on Pacific Coast Highway, making international headlines.

Spyder became part of the story. He had videotaped Eriksson and other parts of his exotic-car collection weeks before the crash.

And he and the crew were in Beverly Hills in April when police pulled over Eriksson's wife in a rare Mercedes and confiscated the vehicle.

His footage suddenly became hot property.

"CNN and others called and asked for Spyder," recalls his mother, Tippi Dobrofsky. "And I said, 'This is his mom.' They were like, 'His mom? "

It started with a video game, Sega GT, a racing simulator in which gamers can get behind such cars as an Alfa Romeo or a Lotus.

The boys learned to appreciate the exotics from there.

Then they'd sit on Spyder's porch in the Dobrofskys' Santa Monica home and shoot digital photos of the fancy cars going by.

At first, a Corvette would suffice. But in this neighborhood, even Bentleys are a dime a dozen.

Now, "we only film it if it's worth over $200,000," said Spyder's 9-year-old brother, Dash.

Tippi Dobrofsky and her husband, Neal, quickly came to embrace their sons' passion — in large part because it was something that they and their sons could do together.

"It's an absolute obsession, but it's good," Tippi said, before joking, "Other kids could be into other weird stuff — like fencing. You can't stop them from liking stuff. It's not drugs. It's nothing bad."