DAY IN THE LIFE
Petrolhead lawyer Damen Bennion
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN obsessed with cars, but three marques stand out. The first is Aston Martin. My father used to come home on every Wednesday evening with Motor and I would snatch it out of his hands as soon as he got in. In the early ’80s the magazine covered the fastest production cars and on the front was a picture of an Aston V8 Vantage and I just thought it was wonderful.
Similarly, dad had a friend who ran a chip shop and he took us out in his new Porsche Turbo. On the main road to Loughborough he went to overtake and I thought ‘We’re all going to die’, but I’d never experienced acceleration like it. And that’s what turned me on to Porsches.
Then, as a 16- or 17-year-old, I could only dream of such exotica and that’s when I started with 2CVs. I bought my first for £200 and learnt how to repair it. I kept buying and running them, but all the time I was scrimping together enough cash for a DB4, which in the early 1990s was about £20,000!
When I was a trainee lawyer and living in Leicestershire I heard about an Aston in the back of a locksmith’s in Nottingham. I went to see him every two weeks until he let me see this DB4 Series 2. The deal was done and over 18 months a pal and I took the car apart and got it to the point that it was really nice. I ran it, serviced it and loved it for 17 years.
As my career progressed, many cars came and went including a 1975 2.7 Carrera, a couple of V8 Vantages and various 911 RSs.
I was starting to do trackdays in 964 RSs and in a quiet moment I was reading about Europe and taxes and thought ‘There’s a car ruse here’, so I started importing cars in my time off. You could order a UK-spec Porsche 996 and save 15% or more on the cost of buying it in the UK. I then started doing the same thing with Mercedes. I also bought a Carrera Cup for peanuts in Boston, USA.
For work, after spells in private practice law firms in the City, then at Sainsbury’s and John Lewis, six years ago I was introduced to Martin Emmison of Goodman Derrick, which specialises in collector-car law among other things. I started there as a partner at the end of 2015 with the brief of heading-up and building the collector-car practice, plus adding an automotive practice, which entails working with suppliers and manufacturers over absolutely everything from parts supply to factories and plant.
For individuals, collectors and businesses in the classic car industry we help with buying, selling and title issues, can sort out finance, taxes or import and registration, and handle anything with a legal aspect to it.
Our services really become relevant for cars worth several hundred thousand pounds, where buying the wrong car, or buying from the wrong person, can be a very costly mistake. You’d be surprised how big that market is: last year I helped transact just shy of £400 million in car deals, in the past 18 months I have been involved in the sale or purchase of 12 McLaren F1s, and the biggest single deal I have done was for £50 million.
The day starts with dropping my boys – Seb (5) and Rex (3) – at 8am and then I cycle into work in the City. It is a desk job, in theory, but with 40% of our business in the US it rarely works out like that and there are plenty of visits. The chance to see, sit in, ride in and maybe even drive someone’s Short Wheelbase, and to call it work, is brilliant. The same goes for ‘work’ trips. I’ve been going to the Pebble Beach Concours since 1997, but now I’m paid to do it – amazing.
I usually finish at 7pm, but right now I am involved in a deal with a buyer in Hong Kong, finance in Europe and a seller in California, so that means early starts and late finishes and often both. It’s not all glamour!
I currently have five cars (the maximum at any one time was seven – you shouldn’t have more cars than you can find time to drive), including a couple of co-owned Astons – a V8 Vantage and 550 Vantage – the 911 Turbo for which the seed was sown so many years ago, and a Porsche Carrera GT. I bought that on the back of a very bad experience with a 959 that I bought in Italy and which cost me a fortune as everything went wrong.
The last car to go, however, would be my beige 2CV. I bought it in the dark for £100 in the 1990s and have since done 150,000 miles and rebuilt it twice. You have to accept that if you use a 2CV it will all fall apart and really rather quickly, but then you just restore it. That’s the 2CV circle of life.
‘I’VE BEEN GOING TO THE PEBBLE BEACH CONCOURS SINCE 1997, BUT NOW I’M PAID TO DO IT – AMAZING’