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Your support makes all the difference.If you’ve visited central London, you may even have passed within a few feet of it, completely unawares. The owners call it the Batcave: it’s the most amazing collection of supercars in the city that you never knew existed.
This is intentionally so. We’re not even allowed to say where it is, such is the secrecy surrounding it, and the need to protect its priceless assets. That’s also why it’s all climate-controlled to exactly 15deg C, and why every car is concealed under identical branded covers within the spotless garage.
You’ll have to thus believe us when we say it contains a McLaren P1, a few Porsche 918 Spyders, a LaFerrari, Dino 246 GT, Jaguar XJ220, Aston Martin DB3, DB5 and DB6, a couple of Bugatti Veyrons, a Ford RS200, a Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 and many, many more. There’s even a Mini Metro in there.
The company behind it is called Windrush, which looks after around 130 cars in London and a similar number at its other facility in the Cotswolds. Owners pay £480 a month to keep their cars in London, which includes an induction handover where it is photographed in its entirety before being valeted and given a protective covering for its interior.
Tyres are super-inflated, the battery is hooked to a trickle charger and it’s then put under wraps – although all cars do have their battery checked each week, and they’re all run up to temperature every 60 days: yes, the firm has its own on-site rolling road. All cars are thus ready to go, but not at the drop of a hat – before departure, the car has to again go through a full check process. It’s amazing attention to detail.
Tim Earnshaw is the man behind it. He used to run the Marlboro hospitality units for the Ferrari F1 team, which taught him everything he needed to know about attention to detail, although he has form even before that – while still at university, he converted a shed on his parent’s farm into a car storage facility.
He continued to run this while working elsewhere, before deciding to make it a full-time business back in 2009: back then, he already had 35 cars in his hands. “I wanted to it be more than simply car storage. I wanted to go the extra mile – in-storage checks, departure protocol, and collection and delivery wherever, whenever.”
Nothing is off limits. Recently, he collected a Rolls-Royce from a customer at 8pm, and returned it at 8am the next morning, fully valeted. Not so long ago, one of the drivers took a Porsche 930 Turbo down to Reims for a customer – because his Ferrari 575M had broken down. The company even has a motto: “the answer’s always yes”. Unless, that is, you ask where it’s located.
Rob Adams is a writer for AutoCar.
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