EXPERTS agree a recession can be the perfect time to start a business.

EXPERTS agree a recession can be the perfect time to start a business.

Even so, launching a supercar hire club with membership fees of £10,000 a year sounded daring – verging on foolhardy.

But ecurie25, in Wakefield, has got off to a flying start, attracting 24 members in its first three months.

And club director Paul Brown, who lives in Bramham, is hoping the firm will continue at full-throttle through 2010.

Mr Brown, who also owns Cars on Demand leasing firm in Wakefield, said: "The business plan for the full year was to get 40 members so already we're over half way. It's going really, really well."

He said: "It's better to start something up in more difficult times because if you gear yourself up for that period and things improve, they can only get better."

The club started life in London and the operation at Wakefield's Trinity Business Park, is a spin-off which boasts a fleet of cars worth around £750,000, including an Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster, Bentley Continental GT and Jaguar XKR 5.0.

The most recent, and most expensive addition, is the Lamborghini LP560-4 Spyder – one of only six in the country – worth around £181,000.

And while the annual membership fee for around 40 days of classic motoring would price many of us out of the market, some people are so wealthy that for them tightening the pursestrings simply means hiring a £150,000 Ferrari F430 rather than buying one. After all, the typical annual cost of running such a motor is about £30,000.

And for those lucky enough to have their own performance car sitting in their garage, they can loan them out to the club to be used by members – and earn some extra cash.

Mr Brown, who runs ecurie25 with wife Karen, said businesspeople didn't always want to attract attention by driving to work in expensive vehicles when times were tough – they were happy to use them once in a while.

He said: "If someone owns something like an F430 they can put it on our fleet, we maintain them and insure it for them and they can let other members use it and pay them so much per mile – it's a way of off-setting the depreciation of their own car."

But for many people it's simply a golden opportunity to drive cars they could only dream of owning. Mr Brown, 42, said for some it was about the thrill of the drive, while for others it was all about the technology and engineering.