SPECIALIST PORSCHE INSURANCE FROM FELLOW ENTHUSIASTS
From air-cooled to water-cooled, RH Specialist vehicle insurance is there for you when your 911 dreams become reality... even if those dreams take a long time!
Meet Emma Airey. She’s the head of RH and has been dreaming about one particular Porsche for 30 years. Indeed, she only got into the insurance industry because of it. Back in the late 1980s, Emma had been training for a job in healthcare when she realised what really mattered. We’ll let her explain.
‘I set my heart on a mid-80s Guards Red 911 Carrera with whale tail and a Pascha interior,’ she says. ‘I thought I could make enough money to buy one within a year if I did really well, so I began selling accident insurance door to door. Turns out it takes a little longer than I thought to realise a dream.’
Emma’s head was turned by another sporting symbol of the 1980s, a TVR Tasmin, and she went on to own many more TVRS over the years as the Porsche dream receded into the distance. But much later, around 2009, Emma found herself at Anglia Classic Auctions.
‘This Guards Red 911 Carrera rumbled past,
“I set my heart on a Guards Red 911 Carrera with a whale tail and a Pascha interior”
looking and sounding amazing,’ she recalls. ‘It even had the whale tail and the striking Pascha check inside. But my partner at the time said we were ‘finished’ if I bought that car…i already had a Rolls-royce Silver Cloud that was eating all my money. So I stood there, my hand twitching at my side, while it was bid up to just £8000, when the hammer came down.’
A crazy price, even then, and we all know what such a car would be worth ten years on. But it’s not the lost investment that bugs Emma, it’s everything else.
‘Obviously I should have bought it. I’ve missed ten years of the pride and enjoyment of ownership, of that experience on the road. And a few sizeable bills, probably, but that’s the same for most classics. But I’m looking once more… the dream isn’t dead yet!’
An office full of petrolheads
Emma is far from the only car nut in RH’S small enthusiast team. To take just two examples, Andrew Thomas is known as the team’s walking encyclopaedia and started working on classics with his grandfather when still a schoolboy, while Phil Hunt was even younger when he wrote to every car maker in The Observer’s Book of Automobiles to ask for brochures… and he’s still got all the replies.
‘We like chatting to people about their classics,’ says Andrew. ‘It helps us to understand how much cars means to their owners, and it can also help to tailor the policy to their personal needs.’
RH doesn’t run a giant impersonal call centre where you never speak to the same person twice, so if you want to talk to Andrew or anyone else on the team, you ring up and ask by name.
That even goes for the boss… if you’ve got a query or a suggestion for ways RH could help you out, email Emma to arrange a mutually convenient time to speak.
RH out-performs the rest!
Those conversations between Emma Airey and RH’S customers produce real results. In the last year, Emma has introduced several ideas that have come directly from classic car owners.
‘One example is what happens when you change your cover,’ says Emma, ‘for instance, you might switch to a laid-up policy over the winter. We’ll refund the difference on a pro-rata basis and you won’t pay a single penny in admin fees.’
‘No fees’ is something you’ll hear a lot from RH. They may not have the biggest marketing budget, preferring to keep premiums really competitive, and perhaps their biggest strength, apart from ‘no policy admin fees’, is offering these amazing benefits.
• Full UK and European accident breakdown and recovery, including home service, is standard on all policies.
• Multiple vehicles welcome on one policy to keep life simple.
• A guarantee to beat your everyday car’s renewal (subject to RH’S standard underwriting criteria*) if you insure a classic with RH, and remember…
• …RH insure the oldest and the newest 911s and everything in between.
• f your Porsche is over 20 years old and the very worst happens, you get the full settlement and retain salvage for free (providing the vehicle is repairable within DVLA guidelines) – so there’s no need to ‘buy back’ your own car and that’s very rare.
So for a thoughtful, personal service from people who share your passion for Porsche and can tailor exactly the cover you need for your 911, contact RH on 0333 043 3911 or see www.rhspecialistinsurance.co.uk.