Meet Audi VIP driver Jane

Jane Masters runs the team of Audi VIP drivers.

Fashion Week isn't all glitz and glamour! A lot of people work hard behind the scenes to make it run smoothly. Head of the Audi VIP driving team Jane Masters is one of them.

"I’m based at the hotel where most of the VIPs stay. And I just get phone calls, or the VIPs come to me and say I need to go to such-and-such show or I need a ride to go to an appointment with one of the designers and so I madly coordinate and find out where all the drivers are and get drivers to pick people up and take them. We’re like a luxury taxi service for the VIPs.

Sometimes people try and convince the drivers that they’re VIPs and that they should be given a ride, but we’re pretty on to it. Night is the most challenging time, trying to get forty or fifty VIPs to off-site shows, and quite often we’ll have two off-site shows at night. You might have one at Newmarket and one at Kingsland and you’ve got to get everybody to the show so that they can start it, because of course they don’t start the show until all the VIPs are there, and then the minute it’s finished you’ve got to get all those forty or fifty people to the next show.

It’s lots of fun, you meet some fascinating people. Pamela Anderson was probably the most challenging. The first time I met her she was very nice. She was just like anybody else really. But as the show went on, she became a bit more of a diva and far-removed from us ordinary folk. Because of the security surrounding her, I had to have a driver in front with some security people and a driver behind me with security people. So anytime she went anywhere it took three cars.

There’s lots of funny things that happen, and you’ve just got to go with the flow and be very flexible and open to what may or may not happen. As a driver you have to be very discrete. You get a car full of these people and they talk about the most intimate things that are going on in their lives and what’s happening and our drivers have to be very discrete because you hear things that you wouldn’t normally get to hear.

Drivers need a sense of fun, and they need to be patient because there’s a lot of sitting around waiting, and then when it’s all on, it’s all on! If you’ve got a sense of fun and you’re open to all sorts of possibilities and you enjoy meeting people, then it’s a really fun thing to do.

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