The Ferrari 599 is probably the best GT car currently in production - fact. It has the stunning 600 bhp engine from the fabulously expensive Enzo, mounted in a chassis so communicative that you know what it’s about to do before it’s done it. It has shift lights and electronic differential controls on the steering wheel that make you feel like Michael Schumacher.
But, you wouldn’t want to take your mother-in-law out to her birthday lunch in it, nor would you want to take your family to Tuscany in it (today’s kids get so whiney on a long journey if they’re tie-wrapped to the roof).
Having a chauffeur-driven one when you want to have a drink or can’t be bothered to park in town, would also make a statement about you which, while fairly complex, probably isn’t terribly complimentary. All this creates a problem if it’s the only car you own.
So what do you do if you want to drive the tastiest metal and carbonfibre, in production? You could buy cars for every occasion. If it was me, I’d take my mother-in-law out for lunch in an Aston Martin DBS (she’s that sort of girl). I’d want a Bentley Continental GTC for the driving holiday in Tuscany and I think I could learn to live with the class warfare that follows you around if you have a Rolls Royce Phantom. The 599 would then be available for the boys’ trip to Le Mans and a couple of hoons out of town. The only problem is that that lot have fairly seriously dented my bank balance (ok, I admit it, I’d be living in the back of the Phantom and would have sold the aforementioned mother-in-law into the white slave trade); they’d be depreciating faster than last night’s Evening Standard; someone would be hovering near the Lutine bell in case I stuffed one and I’d be on first name terms with more service managers than is entirely natural. I’m not absolutely sure where I’d keep them all either, especially if I’d just had to sell my house. If I commuted by car, I’d probably need a 911 Turbo as well, which means that I’d only be doing something like fifty days a year in my rather expensive fleet. Even worse than that, I’d be wondering what the latest Lamborghini was like, I would be going to my grave not knowing what it was like to go for a fang early on a Sunday morning in a Carrera GT and I wouldn’t really be able to speak with any authority in the McLaren Mercedes SLR debate – was Gordon Murray really right to resign?
There is a solution. There are a number of shared access supercar clubs out there but there is only one that fits the bill. The Segrave Club was set up in 2007 to provide its members with unprecedented access to the world’s most exciting cars. A couple of clubs have been around for a while and new ones seem to spring up every few months but none of them do what the Segrave does. For a one-off joining fee of £5,000, which covers two days of the most advanced driver training around, for you and your spouse and annual membership fees that start at £16,000, a select few get roughly fifty days a year with the latest Ferraris, Astons, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Rolls-Royces and even McLarens. The club’s currencies are points and miles and you can blow them quicker by travelling to Shetland and back every summer weekend in an LP640 but most members get the time they want in the cars they want. Other clubs might be a little cheaper to join, but they run cheaper cars to make up the numbers so are more aimed at the Porsche Cayman/BMW M3/Lotus Exige end of the market, with a couple of ageing exotics to go in the adverts.
Nick Hancock, Chief Executive of the Segrave Club, explains, “My team and I had effectively run one of the other clubs for seven years but it was obvious that the time was ripe to move the game on. Most of our members already had fairly serious cars and weren’t exactly happy when they phoned up to see what was available at the weekend and all we had available was an old AC Cobra or a Caterham. In effect, 80% of the members were chasing after the top 20% of the cars so we set up the Segrave only to run the very top of the range cars. Our entry level cars, as it were, are currently an Aston Martin DB9, a Bentley convertible, a Porsche 997 Turbo and a chauffeur driven Maserati Quattroporte Sport GT and the focus of the club is on the top end stuff, the Lambos, Ferraris and such like with the average value of a club car being above £150k. We make sure that we always keep a ratio of members to tasty cars of six to one, with two cars always in hand. This compares with eighteen to one at my old place and worse everywhere else. What that means is that members can always drive the cars they want to, when they want to.”.
“It makes financial sense too. If I use one of our cheapest cars, the Aston Martin DB9, as an example, running one for a year costs nearly three times our annual membership fee.” When challenged, he had the figures too. “Depreciation - £30,000. £125,000 at 7% - £8,750. Insurance - £3,000. Running costs - £4,000. And the average annual mileage of these cars is not high. I think it’s about 3,000 for a Ferrari, even less for a Lamborghini. Our members get upwards of 5,000 miles a year.”
The Segrave’s Operations Director, Mark Bridges, knows a thing or two about keeping these sorts of cars in an “as new” condition, having been Customer Services Manager for Ferrari UK. “The cars are all pretty much brand new, normally being replaced every six months and we go to great lengths to keep them in absolutely perfect order. Our close relationships with the manufacturers and dealers don’t just mean that we get the cars that are meant to be impossible to source – I think our 997 GT2 is one of only four coming to the country this year – but we are able to make sure that they are kept on the road in A1 condition and our members have none of the hassles which can spoil owning these sorts of cars.”
The other thing that is noticeably different about the Segrave is that it is a proper club, not a car rental operation that people pay for in advance. The investors behind the club, a heavyweight assortment of senior merchant bankers, City lawyers and other professionals have provided the club with the backing that enables it to operate out of a very smart clubhouse in a very smart mews in Knightsbridge, as well as having a base at the Honourable Artillery Company’s Armoury House in the City. The clubhouse is a car fetishist’s dream, with the facilities to use a meeting room, watch the grand prix or just have a cold beer with similarly afflicted petrolheads, surrounded by the contents of the toy box. They organise the right sort of motoring events too, with Sir Henry Segrave’s £15 million world land speed record holder, the Golden Arrow, and Wing Commander Andy Green being the stars of the show at the launch event, Aston Martin are bringing Ulrich Bez’s own DBS, the Gulf DBR9 and Darren Turner, their number one Le Mans driver, for a private event in April. Members even had the money-can’t-buy opportunity to attend the press day of the Geneva Motor Show and choose the next cars to join the fleet (which, by the way, were the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, Ferrari 430 Scuderia and maybe even a Bugatti Veyron).
