Weekly Gathering Gets Engines Running at Hunt Valley Town Center

There aren't many places where you'll find a vintage Ferrari parked between a Mustang and a minivan, and there are even fewer places for enthusiasts of all three to talk shop.

But in Hunt Valley, a group of motorheads is about to mark six months of Hunt Valley Cars & Coffee, a weekly auto gathering on Saturdays from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. on the parking lot outside the former Best Buy at Hunt Valley Town Center.

The group will mark six months of weekly meetings on Sept. 29 (though if there's rain, the celebration will take place Oct. 6).

It all started when Rich Williams, a Sparks resident who works by day as a contractor running the corporate wellness program for Becton Dickinson in Sparks, found himself with time on his hands following a back injury last August. A longtime car fanatic, he realized while on bed rest that there were no good gatherings for his kind in the Baltimore area. He started asking around on websites and in February approached Hunt Valley Town Center.

"He had organized everything start to finish and it looked very professional and so we gave him a test run," said Jonathan Dewar, operations manager for the mall.

The first gathering was on March 31. Now, as many as 100 cars pull into the Hunt Valley lot. The coffee half is easily satisfied by nearby , and Chick-Fil-A.

Word of the gatherings spread on Facebook, where a group for Williams' weekly get-togethers now boasts 437 members.

The cars include new arrivals and old headturners. Williams recounted one regular who occasionally brings a 1966 Ferrari 275 GTS.

Williams said the man joked, "You know, I'm here to sell this old tin can and buy one of these newfangled models."

That Ferrari—think the "newer but bigger brother" of the one in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"—runs for about $500,000, Williams said.

"The great thing is there's really no barrier. These are just regular people," Williams said. "There's so many special conversations that go on across the generations about so many different subjects."