TRUST-FUND babies. Wealth flouters. Playboys. Street racers. Chinese supercar owners are used to being called all sorts of names by the general public.

Owen Huang, 32, and Simon Liu, 31, beg to differ. They and a few friends who founded a sports car club in their hometown of Chongqing say such labels are just ill-informed stereotypes.

The pair sat down for an interview after participating in the 2012 Super Club Challenge at Shanghai International Circuit late last month.

The Chongqing Sports Car club, established in 2008, was among the first of its kind in China. It has 25 supercar owners, with an average age of 30. Most of members are self-made millionaires who didn't inherit their fortunes.

Huang, who drives a Ferrari California, is a prime example of the new money. Born to a humble family, he became a stock investor at the tender age of 14, surviving and thriving through the roller-coaster heyday of China's stock market to become rich in his early youth.

Huang bought a Porsche before he was 25 and a Ferrari before he turned 30, fulfilling a childhood dream nurtured in a time when private cars were still a luxury in China.

"It is every boy's dream to have a supercar and fulfill their passion for speed," Huang said. "These days, when I look into those young eyes fixed on supercars roaring past, I see the same aspirations that I once had."

Huang's love for supercars is shared by several other first-generation entrepreneurs in the club - men who seized opportunities and prospered from China's early economic reforms and market opening.

"With plenty of money and time to spare, this age group actually makes up the majority in supercar clubs abroad," said Liu, an entrepreneur who runs a manufacturing business. "Supercar owners in China are mostly young people because they have more exposure to the Western culture like motorsports than their elders."

Liu bought his first sports car, a Mercedes-Benz C230, in 2005. He upgraded to a Porsche in 2006, and then to a Ferrari in 2010. He is not shy about admitting his passion for the big horsepower beauties, saying "it feels great even to just watch them sitting idle in the garage."

Liu doesn't have much spare time for track driving because he works six days a week, sometimes seven. Besides his own company, he also manages the family enterprise of his wife.

Club members gather three times at most each month, not necessarily behind the wheels of their supercars.

Liu said supercars are still a rarity in China, and the club prefers to lie low after suffering from excessive and unwanted attention when the group was first formed.

The club made headlines for the first time in 2008, when several members parked their dazzling wheels together near a riverside promenade in Chongqing, the provincial-level municipality in southwestern China.

"We just found a place to eat, and it didn't occur to us that our cars would become such a spectacle on the street because it wasn't a high-profile area," recalled Huang.

Rich brats

Huang said the press didn't bother to interview them but had a field day portraying them as a pack of rich brats putting daddy's wealth on ostentatious display. Accompanying photos of their cars revealed the license plate numbers.

The story took on a life of its own. Angry netizens tracked down the plate numbers, identified the club members and began poring into their private lives.

"After such a horrible experience, we have learned to make careful plans before each gathering to ensure that we keep a low profile," said Huang. "And we always remember to cover our car plates after parking."

Despite all these efforts, the prevailing view of them on the street still revolves around the image of show-offs. Sometimes, even a single supercar parked legally on a street ends up in a local newspaper as an example of extravagance.

Supercars didn't always carry such derogatory connotations in China. Back in 1992, when Li Xiaohua, a rags-to-riches legend of China's economic reform, became the first mainland Chinese to buy a Ferrari, his flaming red 348Ts was widely admired as a symbol of the self-made success.

"That was the age when getting rich was glorious," Liu said. "But since then, the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening, and the growing discontent over wealth distribution is now vented at owners of conspicuous luxuries, like fancy cars."

Liu admitted that some sports car owners may cause offense with their arrogant, condescending manner with others. But he said it's unfair to tar all sports car owners with the same brush.

The threshold for joining the Chongqing Sports Car Club is not about money, though obviously members need some to afford those high-priced cars.

"We also have moral requirements such as being upright, modest and self-controlled," Huang said. "There will be a background check before a casual face-to-face interview at dinner, and then a probationary period that will last two to three months."

Ethics test

The club is quite cautious about recruiting new members. Only about four have been added every year since 2008. At least five applicants who been rejected after failing the ethics test.

Though the scale of the Chongqing Sports Car Club pales in comparison with many of its peers in China, Huang said the members all agree that slow expansion is necessary to safeguard the image of the club.

The club is not structured to make profits, but it does provide sports car rentals for upscale public relation events to cover up some operational costs.

Some of the club's more dazzling wheels, including Bugattis, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Nissan GT-Rs, Audi R8s and Bentley GTs, have been used at posh celebrity ceremonies marking the opening of upscale house developments in Chongqing, but that's just a sign of support for club members involved in real estate.

Huang said some bar owners in Chongqing once offered club members handsome fees to just park their sports cars outside overnight to give the night clubs more allure.

The offer was declined because club members didn't want to give the impression that they were playboys.

In fact, it would be easier to find a club member at home than in a night club. "Most of us are married and center our lives around our families," Huang said.

Huang has a four-year-old son. He drives the boy to kindergarten and picks him up every weekday, wedging his stock trading in between. Liu also drives his kids to school. But neither of them uses their Ferraris for the daily commute. Huang usually drives a Fiat 500 hatchback, while Liu switches between a VW Golf and a two-seat mini Smart.

Huang said driving a Ferrari on the street is likely to lead to jeering dares.

"Sometimes, they try to provoke me into a street racing with trash talk," he said. "I tell myself to keep calm and stay aloof because I want to be a law-abiding driver and set a good example for my son."

Liu said club members prefer to reserve the high performance of their cars for racetracks. Since Chongqing doesn't have a racing circuit, the group usually goes to the nearby city Chengdu.

"Some pursue speed to let off the steam of working-day pressure," he said, "while others just enjoy the freedom of racing."

The club participated in the 2012 Super Club Challenge at Shanghai International Circuit at the end of last month. Almost all the members showed up with their supercars at this biggest racing carnival in China. "Every time after I finished a lap on the racetrack, I would thank my car for bringing me back safely," Huang said.