Selig & Stretton: Fund Your Passion Podcast Episode 14

Description:

CEO of V-Management, Chris Bucknall is our 13th guest on the Fund Your Passion Podcast. In this episode Amanda and Darren discuss the incredible collection of classic and supercars stored at V-management and his plans to grow the business through sister companies V-engineering and V-events.

What does V-Management do?

“Well, here are V management, we store and manage cars very simply. So we provide secure storage. That’s sort of the base level of what we do. But we also provide management and logistics services. So if you’re lucky enough to have two, three four or five cars, the management of those cars is actually quite complicated. And very often PAs don’t have the requisite skills or indeed the time to do that. So yeah, we do a lot of kind of moving cars around, dealing with paperwork DVLA, the joys of DVLA.”

Have you always had a passion for cars?

“I did. Cars were really the thing in life I’ve been most passionate about from childhood. My father was a big car guy we used to watch the Grand Prix is together and I was obsessed by Grand Prix as a kid. And then, as a little sideline, I got involved in a tour that used to go from London to Monaco every year.”

Why does V-Management store cars without covers?

“Well, I think that there are two sides to that. One is technically, when you store a car actually putting a cover on, it isn’t a good idea. Because you trap air in, in the car, if you leave it open, air passes through it, and that’s a good thing for the car. But if it’s stored in the right environment, that doesn’t matter too much anyway, but it’s really the aesthetics of it. You know, these are works of art, why would you? Why would you cover them up?”

What is Veloce and what makes this experience unforgettable for clients?

Back end of probably 2016, I was introduced to a wonderful philanthropist and collector a call Peter Newmark who has truly the most drop dead collection imaginable that a lot of racing, he’s raced at Monaco is raced at the revival many, many times, and has an amazing you know, he’s a lovely, lovely man. And he had a charity track day utilising his incredible collection. And he was doing very well making lots of money with that track day, and wanted to take it to another level and really wanted to get an events company into him. So by then we had established V-events. And we were already doing a number of our own track days and international tours. And he asked if we would like to get involved in this track day. So we came up with a name Veloce, we thought it’d be good to use a V and came up with the concept of combining the greatest racing drivers we could get our hands on, starting with Derrick, with the greatest cars we could get our hands on.

We invite partnered businesses to bring the highly valued clients along to what has in the past, since 2017, been Goodwood will be Silverstone this year to be driven around these amazing circuits by great racing drivers. So effectively what we’re offering is a money can buy.