Start your engines (3)

If you've got it, flaunt it

Both Wang and Lin said they were deeply influenced by the Hollywood street racing movie series The Fast and the Furious. Now they aim to bring American car-tuning culture back to China, and hope to make it popular and profitable.

The club has already drawn in around 500 members, ranging from 18 to 45 years old, and about 450 of them are in Beijing, Lin told the Global Times Sunday.

Meanwhile, Wang, who also has an auto-refitting shop in Los Angeles, is in charge of enlarging their US operation.

Lin went to Vancouver, Canada in 2007 to pursue a degree in automotive engineering, in line with his tuning hobby. But after being inspired by an MCC in Vancouver, he soon wanted to return to China to set up the first MCC in the Chinese mainland.

Owing to pressure from his parents he stayed in Canada, but finally quit the university in 2011 to come back to Beijing.

"When I came back, I was already late," Lin said. He found that many young people like him, born after 1990, had got their first cars at 18, the minimum age for getting a driver's license in China.

"There are so many people in China, and many of them like modified cars. The people born in the 1980s and 1990s have all gradually become car owners, and they all want to be unique and fashionable," Lin said.

The Beijing MCC has set its threshold low, naming the Volkswagen Golf as the entry model, in a bid to maximize its customer base.

Lin initially invested around 300,000 yuan to set up the club and its website. He said the club will open two retrofitting stores in Beijing and Tianjin and a car-tuning themed restaurant in Beijing this year.

"People call us fuerdai, but we are going to be fuyidai (the rich first generation)" through the MCC business, Lin boasted.