Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary is one dealership that truly goes the extra quarter mile. But is Perry and Steven Itzcovitch’s latest visionary project a tad excessive, a bit distracting, or super costly? Of course. And is it loads of fun, great for dealership team morale, and exciting as hell for customers? Absolutely.
What we are talking about is the Runway Project. It’s an ambitious and innovative plan by the Itzcovitches and their Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary team to turn the Cayley Flying Ranch Airport’s 5,000-foot runway and its adjacent 160-acre property into one of the most dynamic content creation laboratories for Mercedes-Benz in all of Canada — if not globally.
Perry Itzcovitch, an award-winning and highly-successful car dealer with a solid track record, is never satisfied playing the car biz game the traditional way. Fortunately for him, he found allies and eccentricity in Mazen Aboulhosn and Justin Edgar (the dealership’s General Managers), and Chris Mrnik, the Director of Fixed Operations. The dealership is well stocked with adrenaline junkies who also love producing videos.
In 2024, the dealership made headlines with its seemingly head-scratching move to buy a sprawling ranch property and an authorized airport runway located about 45 minutes southeast of the dealership, just south of High River. The plan was to convert the runway into a drag strip where the dealership sales teams could show customers and prospects the true speed, power and handling of some of the performance vehicles in the Mercedes lineup. They checked that box.
But it didn’t stop there.
Spurred by client interest and an ever expanding vision, the dealership team now produces a huge range of video content for their YouTube channel. “It’s a bit of a stretch. Are we selling enough cars, expense-wise, versus revenue to offset this? The answer is — not yet. But we’re making a heck of an impression,” said Perry Itzcovitch in an interview with Canadian auto dealer.
He said when the video project started they had about 8,000 followers and Mercedes-Benz Canada had about 37,000 followers. Now, his dealership has over 200,000 followers on YouTube and nearly four million video views — and counting! (Not that it’s a competition, but by way of comparison, MB Canada is still shy of 38,000 followers).
But let’s go back a step. Why would a luxury car dealership purchase an airport?
“Mazen was the creative. We were racing cars on ice frozen lakes, we were doing tug of wars between G-Wagons and Land Rovers, and all sorts of cool stuff. Then they got the idea to use a racetrack to just show what the cars were capable of doing,” said Itzcovitch. “We used them as a way to highlight our product and highlight us as a destination to buy your car.”
The dealership was renting the runway to produce content, and it was for sale. Mazen approached Itzcovitch and his brother Steven with an idea. He said: “Guys, you have to buy this runway. If we don’t have this runway we can’t do these kinds of productions.”
Itzcovitch said he noticed the video projects were a great magnet to get people in the dealership excited — and customers too. “The guys involved loved doing it. It was like they had a party every time they went out there, they’d bring family, and it was an event,” said Itzcovitch.
The videos produced at the Runway are kind of a cross between Top Gear quirky, with head-to-head drag races of high-performance cars and adolescent “mine is faster than yours” bravado. In any given episode, the team will pit some of the world’s fastest vehicles against one another and let ’em rip down the runway, seeing which one clocks the fastest half-mile time.
They don’t fudge the results, and the high-performance Mercedes models picked for the various races don’t always win — but that credibility (and high production values) explains why the videos are so popular.
Customers now approach the staff after spotting them on YouTube. When they ask about the videos: “My response is simple — buy a new car and I’ll take you out there,” joked Itzcovitch.
The videos are produced by the company’s marketing partner Squared Marketing. “They do a really fantastic job of having an FPV drone pilot on site,” said Aboulhosn. “We’ve had a really good time making the production, and we are able to see it from multiple angles. A lot of it comes down to the magic of editing.”
Aboulhosn stars in many of the videos. Watching his exuberance and chatter in the videos, along with the dealership’s team members, is like watching a group of teenage car-loving speed demons sitting around their tree fort, thumbing through car magazines, and talking trash about who would kick who’s butt on the track.
Except these “teens” have the connections and the facility to make fabled and legendary head-to-head races happen.
In many cases, the people providing the vehicles for the drag races are the owners themselves. One of the conditions is that the whole enterprise helps raise money for local charities. The dealership has used events to raise thousands for causes like the Calgary Police Youth Foundation and Kids’ Cancer Care.
The other benefit has been internal. Instead of just a marketing play, the runway has also become a staff engagement tool. The dealership organizes “Runway Sundays,” where employees from every department — accounting clerks to porters — get behind the wheel of AMGs.
“Some companies have staff barbecues. We let our people race a couple million dollars’ worth of cars,” said Aboulhosn. It’s been a huge morale booster and a way to retain talent in a high-turnover business.”
For Itzcovitch, the broader lesson to other car dealers is clear: you don’t need a private runway to stand out. “Some guys may not have a runway, but what unique selling proposition makes their store special? Maybe it’s a lounge, maybe it’s small touches like our candy bistro. Customers want to feel special and get a view under the tent,” he said.
And both Itzcovitch and Aboulhosn believe this sort of initiative would likely only work in a family-run operation. “You’d never see this from a big dealer group,” said Aboulhosn. “It’s too corporately managed, too removed from the people on the front lines.”Here, hierarchy doesn’t exist — everyone has equal value.”
Itzcovitch added that “Runway has helped us go from being a good team to being a high-performance team.”
And that, perhaps, is the bigger lesson. You don’t need a runway, a drone crew, or a million-dollar supercar lineup to stand out. What matters is finding a way to make your dealership memorable, authentic, and magnetic — for staff as much as for customers.
As Itzcovitch put it. “Every dealer has the same cars and the same showroom tiles. The only thing that sets you apart is the culture you build and the experiences you create. That’s what people remember.”
For Canadian dealers, that’s the aha moment: whether it’s a candy bistro in service, a small community fundraiser, or, yes, a drag strip, runways are optional — but the courage to be different is not.
