Forget Walter Mitty. You want to be like exotic car nut James DiIorio.

All car nuts remember when they realized that they are not normal people, and for James DiIorio it was in 1964 when he read a story of the new Shelby Cobra 427 in Car and Driver that appeared when he was 10 years old. “I was hooked for life,” says the Southern California-based racer, collector and real estate businessman.

Born in Boston but raised in San Francisco, DiIorio’s first car was a 1964 Oldsmobile 98 hand-me-down from his older brother, intended to be a daily driver for school. However, at 15 years old, DiIorio turned it into a drag racer and promptly blew up the motor and transmission. “Back then, I was young and crazy,” he admits. “Now I’m just crazy.” He fixed the Olds, teaching himself mechanics with Chilton manuals and the new tools he bought. “My father wasn’t happy with any of this,” DiIorio says. “The first real money I made, I went out and bought a new Corvette. My father flipped a gasket.”

Since then DiIorio has owned more than 100 cars. “I got older, and prior to 2008 made a ton of money—and I’m not married, so I have no kids. I had a massive car collection, completely bonkers.” That collection included a Ferrari Enzo, a Daytona, a Lamborghini Miura and a Corvette Z06 modified to 650 hp. He says his Lotus Exige was the best-handling car he’s had, and his Lamborghini Espada with a Countach 12-cylinder was his favorite hot rod. “I went through a 1957 Cadillac phase, had a 1965 Pontiac GTO, five Corvettes, Alfas, Jaguars, all the early XKEs,” he adds. A 1966 Aston Martin DB6 was his first move out of muscle cars and into supercars.

Supercar love led DiIorio to Italy, the birthplace of the genre. About eight years ago, he was drawn to Italy to tour the Lamborghini and Ferrari factories and inspect a Lamborghini Formula 1 car he wanted to buy. While in the Modena neighborhood of those famous makers he discovered Horacio Pagani, a car nut with humble beginnings in Argentina who has been building Mercedes V-12-powered $1 million supercars since 1993. Pagani’s Zonda caught DiIorio’s eye, especially a red roadster. “I was completely head-over-heels in love with it—the best car I have ever driven in my life,” he recalls. “It was only about $500,000, but they told me they wouldn’t sell it to me because they can’t ship cars to the U.S. Now they’re $1.3 to $1.4 million, priced out of the ballpark.”

“I had the car for three days. I fell completely in love with it.”

DiIorio was also drawn to the Zonda’s handmade design and construction. “Near Modena, you drive up a real long driveway to Pagani’s house,” he explains. “Essentially the living room is the showroom, and downstairs in the basement is where he makes these cars.” Not being able to bring a Pagani home to the U.S. put DiIorio into what he calls a clinical depression. “I was really, really, really in bad shape,” he admits.

Luckily, DiIorio knew a possible cure for unrequited car lust. When he left Italy, he stopped at a friend’s home in Belgium. The friend was busy traveling and hadn’t driven his Ferrari F40, so he asked DiIorio to spend a few days driving it. “The car had been sitting, and my friend was starting to worry,” DiIorio says. “So we had a mechanic go over it, and then I had the car for three days. I fell completely in love with it.”

When he returned to California, DiIorio bought a 1992 F40 with low miles, but it wasn’t the wonderful creature he drove in Belgium: “I drive the thing, and it’s a pig,” he says bluntly. Three times he sent it to his mechanic, who told him the car was in perfect running order. Finally, he found a Ferrari club member who explained that conforming to U.S. emissions and safety regulations added 600 lb. to the supercar. “I’m clinically depressed, I can’t have a Pagani, and now I have a F40 that drives bad,” DiIorio says. “The only way to get the weight down is to re-body the car. At this point I’m on suicide watch. I hated the car.”

However, another friend had been racing a Le Mans track version of the F40, and he had replacement parts made of carbon fiber. “So we re-bodied my car, went through the motor, and now it looks like a race car,” DiIorio says. “We upgraded to race suspension and added titanium Brembo brakes. It’s at 650 hp now and weighs just over 2000 lb. Old Ferraristi are shocked; they say it’s not original anymore. But the young chargers think it’s the coolest car. The original U.S. car is an abomination created by the U.S. government. This is now what Enzo envisioned when he commissioned the car.” DiIorio and his friends have nicknamed the F40 “Mad Max.” He says, “I just drove it last Sunday, and it runs beautifully.”

Attending races planted seeds in DiIorio’s mind too. In 1991 he watched Minardi Formula 1 cars race in Phoenix, and the following year the team switched to large 3.5-liter V-12 Lamborghini racing motors. About seven years ago, he found one of the cars in Italy. “The car had been sitting, and we had to do a whole sorting-out process,” he recalls. “We started it, and the car made such a racket—the sound was such glory. We emptied the whole town; everyone came to see what was making the noise. The police even had to come. Naturally, we bought the car.”

Back in the U.S., DiIorio took the 800-hp, 15,000-rpm Lambor­ghini to the road course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Although it was 6 a.m. when DiIorio started the engine, it drew a crowd of about 150 people. “I thought, ‘Please don’t let me kill this thing in front of all these people,’” he grins. “The first five laps the motor started cutting out. So instinctively I floored it. The tach shoots up to 12,000 rpm. All of a sudden this thing just explodes. I’m flying down the straight, shifting as fast as I can, it’s like being shot out of a cannon. I’m flying down the straight, and up comes this corner. I hit the brakes—luckily I had warmed them up. The car went from maybe 170 mph to 20 mph instantly. It braked so hard, it threw my neck out. After that I had to go to the chiropractor—that’s how violent it decelerated. This thing was so mind-boggling.”

These days DiIorio is fascinated by the relatively accessible price of used Ferrari 599 production cars, while the wilder GTO based on the 599 is valued through the roof. “I did a lot of research on this,” he says. “It’s not that hard to convert a 599 into a GTO, and it’s the best-sounding car on the street these days.” DiIorio’s new plan is to create a custom, hot-rod GTO in the typical American sense, and take it to Nürburgring with some friends to lap the famous German track for a month’s vacation.

That may seem crazy to most of us, but when you’re already crazy it’s just normal. Anyway, DiIorio says, “What else are you going to do with your life?”

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