Sarasota is home to a unique group of auto enthusiasts who share a passion for everything high-performance.

The group calls itself the Café Racers and gets together twice a month at lunch to talk about cars. Participants cross all socioeconomic and cultural lines, and interest levels run the gamut from hot rods and racing to classic collecting, muscle cars and mega-power exotics.

The Sarasota area is home to many traditional car clubs, often dedicated to single marques like Corvette, Ferrari, Jaguar and Rolls-Royce. Others appeal to owners of broader ranges of automobiles, such as the Suncoast Chapter of the Antique Automobile Club of America and the British Car Club. But this club is different.

Café Racers is a non-club club for hardcore high-performance and specialty vehicle enthusiasts. There are no membership cards, no dues and no club shirts or hats. And there's no membership roster because there are no formal members. What ties them together is their love for everything automotive and the pulse-quickening experience of driving high-performance cars. Anyone sharing that passion, regardless of gender, is always welcome to attend.

Comparable groups have surfaced in other parts of the country. Los Angeles has its car guys who make early Saturday morning breakfast runs to the Do-Nut Shop in Manhattan Beach. They turn the parking lot into a full-blown car show and by 9 a.m. are well on their way home. In Santa Fe, enthusiasts flock to the Santa Fe Grill for the weekly Tuesday Car Table lunch. In her "Now and Then" column in AutoWeek, Denise McCluggage wrote, "The Tuesday Car Table is not a club; it's a fixed place and time and a floating assemblage of people who are keen on cars." To that, the Café Racers have added: "keen on high-performance cars."

Sarasota's car guys started in 2002 with occasional lunches and, by mid-2004, had established a more formal biweekly event. They meet at the Steak & Ale on South Tamiami Trail, which-not coincidentally-has a huge parking lot.

"Since there is no treasury or records kept, we don't have to sit or sleep through reports and minutes from the previous meeting," says Café Racer regular Steve Keech. Born and raised in Sarasota, Steve owns Keech's Performance Machine, a shop specializing in building high-horsepower street and racecar engines. He drives (and drag races) a restored 1957 Chevy Nomad powered by a twin turbocharged, 1,000-horsepower 406 Chevy engine.

Paul Zazarine, a Corvette-driving automotive editor, photojournalist and author of a number of books on muscle cars, recently moved to Sarasota with his wife and family and has become a Café Racer regular. "It's great having lunch with real car guys who know what they're talking about and who put their money where their mouths are," he says. "Conversation is always spirited and, like Cable TV's Speed Channel, it's all cars all the time."

"Testosterone levels run high, and we can be a tough crowd," agrees Gary Roberts, a high-profile luxury homebuilder (Bamboo Building & Development) and one of the group's founders. Roberts owns an enviable collection of super-fast exotic cars, including Ferraris, a new 200-mph Lamborghini Murcielago and a twin turbocharged V-12 Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG.

Fellow Café Racer regular Larry Jaworske echoes Roberts' sentiments. "When you come to one of our lunches, you'd best park your ego sensitivity with your car," he says. After selling his precision metal fabrication and prototyping company a couple of years ago, Jaworske and his family moved from the Boston area to Sarasota. "Finding the right house was not easy. My wife had her requirements, our teenage daughter rides and wanted to live close to where she could board her horse, and my son wanted to live in an area with lots of kids his age. Me, all I really wanted was a six-car garage," says Jaworske who drives a S500 AMG Mercedes and shows a classic E-Type Jaguar roadster.

"Just about anything goes at our lunches, but you can't cross the line. Mean-spirited people and arrogant snobs, regardless of how many cars they may own, are not welcome," says vintage sports car racer Archie Urciuoli.

Retired as chairman of Merrill Lynch International in 1999, Urciuoli has been an amateur road racer since the early 1960s when he actively campaigned Jaguars in the Sports Car Club of America's (SCCA) New England Region. Shortly before retiring from a 30-year career at Merrill Lynch, he took his Mark IV Ford GT-40 to Speed Week at the Bonneville Salt Flats (Utah) and was clocked at over 226 mph.

Last summer he shipped his GT-40 to France for the 24-hour Classic for vintage racecars at LeMans. "We didn't have a podium finish, but we finished and placed well in a prestigious field of vintage racecars at one of the most exciting race tracks in the world," says Urciuoli, who showed up at a recent Café Racer lunch in his latest pride and joy, a custom green 1968 Mustang fastback, just like the one Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt.