HISTORIC MOTORSPORT

There is a point in the life of any important historic motor car when replacement is no longer straightforward. Components disappear from supply, previous repairs reveal themselves and engines that have already lived several lives require considerably more than another conventional rebuild.

This is the world in which Setford & Company operates.

From its facilities near Southampton, the company brings together engine building, precision machining, component manufacture and engineering development, with particular experience across Alfa Romeo and Ferrari and a wider portfolio of significant road and competition cars.

Much of this capability sits under one roof. Engines can be dismantled and assessed, components measured and machined, unavailable parts recreated and the finished assembly built and developed without surrendering critical stages of the process to outside suppliers. For owners of rare machinery, that continuity provides both control and accountability.

Inside the engine

Historic engines rarely arrive with a blank history.

Some have covered enormous mileages; others have been rebuilt several times, modified for competition or repaired using whatever components were available at the time. Original tolerances may have changed and apparently correct parts can conceal compromises made decades earlier.

The first task is therefore often one of investigation.

Setford & Company begins by establishing exactly what it has in front of it — measuring, inspecting and understanding the condition and specification of the engine before determining how it should be rebuilt.

Precision machining and blueprinting then allow individual components to be prepared around the requirements of that particular power unit. The aim is not simply to create an engine that produces the right numbers, but to build one that retains the characteristics appropriate to the car.

Competition introduces another layer of complexity. A historic race engine must deliver performance while remaining reliable under sustained load, often within tightly defined period or regulatory specifications. Finding performance without engineering away the character of the original design requires experience as much as machinery.

And when the required component no longer exists, Setford & Company can make it.

Reverse engineering allows an original or surviving component to be studied, measured and reproduced through modern precision manufacturing. In a field where an obsolete part can otherwise halt an entire project, the ability to manufacture rather than compromise is significant.

Where engineering meets competition

A workshop can reveal a great deal about an engine. A race circuit reveals everything else.

Setford & Company's involvement in international historic motorsport takes its engineering into an environment where reliability and preparation are tested without sympathy. Engines operate under sustained loads, mechanical weaknesses are quickly exposed and the smallest detail can determine whether a car completes an event.

The company prepares and supports historic competition cars for clients racing internationally, with its involvement extending into technical assistance and the practical logistics of running significant machinery away from home.

That experience creates a direct relationship between workshop and circuit. What is learned through competition — about durability, temperatures, component behaviour, set-up and diagnosis — becomes knowledge that can be applied to subsequent engineering projects.

Importantly, those lessons are not confined to racing cars. A well-engineered road car benefits from the same understanding of reliability and mechanical behaviour, even if its demands are considerably less extreme.

Making the irreplaceable usable

As historic cars become older, preserving them increasingly depends upon preserving the ability to engineer them.

The supply of original components will continue to diminish. Period expertise will become harder to find, and some cars will inevitably arrive carrying the consequences of repairs undertaken when their historical significance was very different from today.

Setford & Company's relevance lies in its ability to bridge those worlds.

Traditional mechanical understanding provides the knowledge to recognise how an important engine or component should work. Modern machining and manufacturing provide the means to restore that function when the original solution is no longer available. Motorsport then provides an environment in which that engineering is tested in practice.

Whether rebuilding an important Alfa Romeo or Ferrari engine, recreating a component unavailable for decades or preparing a historic competition car for another season of racing, there is a consistent principle behind the work: the engineering should serve the motor car, not overwhelm it.

That combination of mechanical understanding, manufacturing capability and engineering proven through competition is what makes Setford & Company trusted and HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Setford & Company
Southampton, England
+44 (0)1489 877868

There is a considerable difference between restoring a historic racing car and preparing one to race for six hours.

The first demands an understanding of how the car was constructed, what has survived and how it should be rebuilt. The second introduces an altogether less forgiving test. Components become hot, brakes wear, drivers change and weaknesses that might remain hidden during occasional road use have a habit of revealing themselves very quickly.

Valley Motorsport has spent more than two decades working within that environment.

Founded by Nigel Morris in 2004, the Shropshire business began with a particular focus on the competition Jaguar E-Type, developing its understanding of the car through restoration, preparation and, importantly, racing. Since then, its involvement has expanded across historic GT, sports and endurance machinery, while competition at events including the Goodwood Revival and Spa Six Hours has remained central to the way the workshop operates.

Learning through competition

There are few better development programmes for a historic racing car than actually competing with one.

Nigel's involvement with the E-Type grew from earlier experience with the Demon Tweeks race team, and the Jaguar subsequently became closely associated with Valley Motorsport. Rather than separating preparation from competition, the two developed alongside one another.

That approach has produced a considerable competition record. Valley Motorsport has taken multiple victories at the Spa Six Hours and won at Goodwood, including the RAC TT Celebration, while E-Types prepared by the business have also won both the model's 50th and 60th Anniversary races.

The results tell only part of the story.

Endurance racing has a particularly effective way of exposing engineering weaknesses. An engine that performs perfectly over a handful of laps must continue doing so hour after hour. Braking, cooling, transmission and suspension systems are subjected to repeated loads, while seemingly minor problems can become considerably more significant as a race develops.

Each event therefore contributes information that eventually finds its way back into the workshop.

For historic racing, where development must remain sympathetic to the character and regulations surrounding the original machinery, that experience matters. The challenge is not simply extracting greater performance, but understanding where performance can be found without compromising the qualities that make the car historically interesting in the first place.

The enduring E-Type

Few historic racing cars are as familiar as the Jaguar E-Type, but familiarity does not necessarily make one straightforward to prepare.

The fundamental design is more than six decades old, and transforming an E-Type into a competitive historic racing car requires considerably more than increasing engine performance. Weight, suspension geometry, braking, cooling, transmission and reliability all become part of the equation.

Years spent racing the cars have allowed Valley Motorsport to explore those relationships in circumstances that cannot easily be replicated away from the circuit.

It is also where restoration and competition preparation begin to overlap. A road car being transformed for historic racing may require extensive work before development can even begin, while an established competition car can carry decades of modifications, repairs and previous thinking that first need to be understood.

The objective is not necessarily to make an old racing car behave like something modern. Much of the attraction of historic motorsport lies precisely in the fact that it does not.

A well-prepared E-Type should still require its driver to work with the machinery. Its performance comes from developing the original concept rather than disguising it, retaining the characteristics that made these cars such formidable competition machines in period.

Beyond Jaguar

The E-Type may provide the clearest thread through Valley Motorsport's history, but the workshop today encounters a much broader spectrum of competition machinery.

Cars from the 1950s and 1960s sit alongside later GT and endurance racers, while experience has extended into Group C and more contemporary LMP machinery. The engineering differences between them can be enormous, but the underlying process remains remarkably similar.

Every competition car presents a collection of compromises.

Performance must be balanced against reliability, originality against development and outright speed against the realities of completing a race. In historic motorsport there is an additional responsibility: understanding where development improves a car and where it begins to alter the character of what is being preserved.

Since 2019, that work has been carried out from Valley Motorsport's purpose-built facility near Market Drayton. Cars move between workshop and circuit, with what happens at one informing decisions made at the other.

It is perhaps this cycle that best explains the business.

Restoration establishes what the car is. Engineering explores what it can do. Competition reveals whether the decisions made in the workshop actually work.

After more than twenty years, the Jaguar E-Type remains an important part of that story, but the accumulated knowledge now reaches considerably further.

Historic racing has always been capable of separating theory from reality. Valley Motorsport has built its understanding on the latter.

That depth of competition experience, engineering knowledge and understanding of historic racing machinery is why Valley Motorsport is a trusted and HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Valley Motorsport
Shropshire, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1978 661862

There is an important difference between preserving a Formula One car and keeping one alive.

Displayed without an engine, surrounded by photographs and trophies, a Grand Prix car can still tell an extraordinary story. But much of what made it significant was mechanical: the complexity of its engineering, the violence of its performance and the sound and movement that accompanied it around a circuit.

Recreating that experience decades later is considerably more difficult.

Officina Caira has built its reputation around precisely that challenge. Founded in 2015 by Belgian-Italian brothers Sebastiano and Silvano Caira, the business specialises in historic Formula One machinery, restoring cars from different generations of the sport and, where possible, returning them to running condition.

From its workshop near Brussels, cars carrying names including Ferrari, Sauber, Benetton, Arrows, Williams and Jordan have passed through the business. Some arrive remarkably complete. Others present a rather more complicated puzzle.

Reconstructing the past

A Formula One car is perhaps one of the least straightforward historic motor cars to restore.

Unlike a production car, it was never designed around longevity. Components were created for competition, specification could change from one Grand Prix to another and development continued throughout a season. Once a car left frontline use, engines, gearboxes, electronics and other components might be removed, replaced or separated entirely from the original chassis.

Decades later, establishing exactly what belongs to a particular car can therefore become an exercise in research as much as engineering.

Officina Caira's approach begins by understanding the specification and history of the individual chassis before dismantling and inspecting it. Components can then be rebuilt or replaced where necessary, with attention given not simply to appearance but to recreating the mechanical configuration in which the car competed.

That distinction becomes particularly important with Formula One machinery.

A car wearing the correct livery can look convincing from several metres away. Returning the machinery beneath it to the appropriate specification demands something considerably deeper: access to original components, technical knowledge and an understanding of the continual development that characterised the sport.

The objective is to recover more than the silhouette.

When a racing car runs again

The most interesting stage comes when restoration moves beyond presentation.

Officina Caira has become particularly associated with returning historic Formula One cars to running condition and bringing them back onto circuits. It changes the nature of restoration because the finished car must do considerably more than look correct.

Safety becomes fundamental. Components that may have survived decades require careful examination before being subjected once again to the loads generated by a Formula One car. Mechanical systems have to operate together, while engines, transmissions and supporting systems must function under conditions approaching those for which they were originally designed.

When successful, the result offers something static preservation cannot.

A running Formula One car communicates its history through noise, heat, vibration and speed. For spectators who may only know a particular generation through television footage or photographs, seeing the machinery moving again provides an entirely different understanding of the period.

Officina Caira has taken historic Formula One cars to circuits including Monza, Spa-Francorchamps, Silverstone and Imola, sometimes placing them back into the environment in which cars of their type originally competed.

There is something particularly appropriate about that.

These were machines designed around movement. Returning them to a circuit allows their engineering to be understood in the context for which it was created.

Preserving a complicated generation

The challenge becomes greater as historic Formula One moves into more recent decades.

Mechanical Grand Prix cars already demand specialist knowledge, but later machinery introduced increasingly sophisticated electronics, hydraulic systems, bespoke control units and highly specialised powertrains. Preserving those cars as functioning machines may ultimately prove considerably more difficult than preserving much older racing cars.

Parts supply presents another problem.

Many components were produced in tiny numbers and were never commercially available. Others remained the intellectual property of the teams that created them. Reconstructing an incomplete Formula One car therefore depends heavily upon relationships, research and access to the people and organisations connected with its original life.

Officina Caira's relationship with Sauber is particularly relevant in this respect. The workshop has handled numerous cars from the Swiss constructor, alongside machinery representing very different chapters of Formula One history.

Its wider inventory demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of that history: from cars of the 1970s through the turbocharged excess of the 1980s, the increasingly sophisticated machines of the 1990s and into Formula One's modern era.

Each presents a different preservation problem.

Perhaps that is what makes this area of the collector car world particularly interesting. Formula One cars were created at the leading edge of contemporary engineering, yet the very technology that made them advanced can become their greatest vulnerability as they age.

Preserving them therefore requires more than maintaining bodywork and provenance. It means retaining the knowledge, components and engineering understanding necessary to make extraordinarily specialised machinery function again.

A Formula One car will always carry historical significance sitting silently in a collection.

But hearing one start, watching it leave the pit lane and seeing it return to the circuit adds another dimension entirely.

Officina Caira has made preserving that dimension a central part of its work.

That combination of historical research, specialist engineering and commitment to keeping important Formula One machinery functioning is why Officina Caira is a trusted and HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Officina Caira
Belgium
+32 67 63 86 61

There comes a point in the life of an old motor car when maintaining it is no longer simply a question of replacing worn components.

The parts may no longer exist.

For an important Ferrari approaching seventy years old, that presents a particular challenge. These were often low-production motor cars built using components that changed through relatively short manufacturing runs. Competition cars present an even greater problem, having evolved throughout their racing lives and subsequently endured decades of use, repair and modification.

Keeping them operational therefore requires more than knowing how they were built. Sometimes it requires knowing how to build them again.

Roelofs Engineering has been doing precisely that since 1975.

Founded by mechanical engineer Piet Roelofs, the Dutch company began working with classic Italian machinery before developing a particular specialism in Ferrari. From relatively modest beginnings in Oosterbeek, the business moved to Rheden in 1988 and today works across Ferrari machinery from the company's earliest cars through to approximately the F40 era.

Restoration forms one part of that work. Engines, transmissions and differentials another. Increasingly important, however, is the ability to manufacture the components required to keep these cars functioning at all.

When the original part is no longer enough

Scarcity presents an obvious problem when maintaining an old Ferrari, but availability is only part of the equation.

An original component may still exist yet no longer be suitable for continued use. Decades of fatigue, corrosion or competition can take their toll, particularly when a car continues to be driven as intended. Preserving the original part at any cost can sometimes become incompatible with preserving the motor car as an operational machine.

Roelofs Engineering has consequently developed considerable capability in reverse engineering and component manufacture. Existing parts can be studied, measured and reproduced, while the company also builds complete engines, gearboxes and rear axles for a range of classic Ferraris.

Modern equipment sits alongside traditional mechanical knowledge. Engines are run and evaluated on an in-house SuperFlow dynamometer before installation, while flow testing, alignment equipment and a mechanical fuel-injection test bench developed by Piet Roelofs allow systems conceived decades ago to be examined with a level of precision unavailable when many of the cars were new.

It is an interesting intersection between old and new.

The technology is contemporary, but the purpose is not to modernise the Ferrari. It is being used to understand the original engineering more accurately and, where necessary, recreate it.

Sometimes the need for that capability only becomes apparent on the circuit.

Racing finds the weaknesses

Roelofs Engineering has remained closely involved with historic competition, preparing and running cars at events including Goodwood, Le Mans Classic and the Historic Grand Prix at Zandvoort.

The machinery involved is significant. Ferrari 250 GTOs, 250 LMs, 250 SWBs and 365 GTB/4 Daytonas have all been raced under the team's care, alongside later sports and prototype machinery.

Competition provides a rather effective engineering test.

At Zandvoort in 2026, an original wheel hub failed on the company's Daytona. Rather than simply ending the story there, the failure provided the starting point for manufacturing new hubs so that the car — and potentially others like it — could continue competing safely.

That single example says something broader about maintaining historic racing machinery.

Components eventually reach the end of their usable lives. The decision then becomes whether the car should stop being used, whether an increasingly scarce original replacement should be found, or whether the component can be properly recreated.

Roelofs has encountered the same process elsewhere. Gearboxes have been manufactured for competition cars, engines developed and rebuilt, and weaknesses discovered through racing fed back into engineering decisions made in the workshop.

There is an important distinction between changing a historic car because modern technology allows it and making a stronger replacement for a component that is preventing the car from doing what it was built to do.

The latter can become a form of preservation in itself.

Understanding what should remain

That philosophy does not mean every old component should automatically be replaced.

Restoration demands a different kind of judgement, particularly when originality survives. Roelofs Engineering's own restoration of a 1959 Ferrari 250 GT Pininfarina Coupé provides an interesting example.

When the car was stripped, traces of a lighter blue were discovered beneath its later dark-blue finish, including areas around the doors and windows. The evidence suggested that the Ferrari had originally been painted the lighter colour before being changed early in its life. Rather than simply following the documented colour, the physical evidence found on the car helped determine the direction of the restoration.

It illustrates the other side of the work.

Manufacturing capability makes it possible to recreate almost anything, but good restoration also depends upon knowing when not to.

An original Ferrari road car, a heavily campaigned competition car and a machine being prepared to race again present very different questions. One may justify conservation, another extensive mechanical rebuilding and another the manufacture of components capable of surviving competition.

After more than half a century working with these cars, Roelofs Engineering has encountered most of those questions.

Its continued involvement in racing is perhaps particularly important. A historic Ferrari that regularly competes exposes its engineering in a way a static restoration never can. Components fail, solutions are developed and knowledge accumulates through experience rather than theory alone.

The result is a cycle familiar to much of Ferrari's own history: build, test, race, understand and improve.

The cars may now be historic, but the process remains remarkably relevant.

Keeping significant Ferraris alive ultimately depends upon retaining more than the cars themselves. It requires the specialist knowledge to rebuild their engines, understand their mechanical systems and, when the last usable original component finally disappears, possess the engineering ability to make another.

That combination of more than fifty years of Ferrari knowledge, specialist component manufacture, restoration expertise and experience proven through historic competition is why Roelofs Engineering is a trusted and HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Roelofs Engineering
Rheden, The Netherlands
+31 (0)26 495 1551

A vintage Bentley can arrive at a restoration workshop for very different reasons.

One may have survived remarkably intact and require little more than careful conservation. Another may be destined for long-distance touring, while the next is expected to compete seriously on circuits where cars approaching a century old are still being driven remarkably hard.

Treating each in the same way would rather miss the point.

At Kingsbury Racing, the restoration of vintage Bentleys is closely connected with what happens after the workshop doors close. Cars are preserved, rebuilt, raced and rallied, while the components required to keep them doing so can be designed and manufactured within the same business.

It creates an interesting perspective on restoration. Historical accuracy matters, but so does understanding the life a particular motor car is expected to lead.

Knowing when to leave well alone

Perhaps one of the more difficult decisions in restoration is recognising when something should not be restored at all.

Kingsbury's work on an original Bentley Speed Six saloon illustrates the point particularly well. Discovered in remarkably preserved condition, the temptation might easily have been to return the car to the immaculate appearance expected of a conventional restoration.

Instead, much of its accumulated age was allowed to remain.

The worn surfaces and patina formed part of the Bentley's history and were carefully preserved, while the mechanical elements were returned to original specification. The distinction is important. The car could function as intended without erasing the physical evidence of the decades through which it had survived.

It is an approach increasingly relevant to significant historic motor cars.

New paint can be recreated. Leather can be retrimmed and metalwork refinished. What cannot be manufactured again is genuine age. Once an original surface has disappeared beneath restoration work, the information it carried disappears with it.

Yet preservation cannot simply mean leaving everything untouched. A motor car remains a mechanical object, and one expected to travel requires brakes, steering, engine and driveline to perform safely and reliably.

The judgement lies in understanding where conservation should end and intervention should begin.

Restoring for a purpose

A different Bentley can demand an entirely different answer.

Kingsbury's restoration of a 1924 Speed Model 3-Litre involved rebuilding the car from the ground up. A new ash-frame body was constructed, panels formed and covered in painted fabric, blade wings recreated to the original profile and rare Bosch lamps restored. The engine was converted to 4½-Litre competition specification, while the driveline was rebuilt and the completed car extensively tested on road and track.

This was restoration with use built into the process.

That philosophy becomes considerably more apparent when the destination is competition or long-distance rallying. Kingsbury regularly races vintage Bentleys and has supported cars at events including Le Mans Classic, where machinery prepared by the workshop continues to be subjected to precisely the kind of sustained competition for which Bentley established its reputation.

The 2025 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge provided an altogether different test.

A 1926 Bentley 3-Litre Speed Model prepared with Kingsbury involvement covered more than 15,000 kilometres in 37 days, driven solo by Tomas de Vargas Machuca. The car retained its original factory mechanical specification and coachwork and finished first in class, becoming the first vintage Bentley home.

Preparing a motor car approaching its centenary to cross continents presents a rather different restoration brief from preparing one for a concours lawn.

Reliability becomes part of preservation because without it, the car cannot continue doing the things that made such machinery significant in the first place.

Making what no longer exists

Eventually, however, every regularly used vintage motor car encounters the same problem: parts wear out.

For Bentleys built between 1921 and 1932, replacement components cannot simply be ordered through a conventional parts department. Original pieces become increasingly scarce, while components that have survived for a century may no longer be suitable for racing, rallying or sustained road use.

This is where Kingsbury Racing's restoration work overlaps with its engineering operation.

Within the Bicester workshop, traditional mechanical skills sit alongside contemporary machining and manufacturing capability. Components for 3-Litre, 4½-Litre, 6½-Litre and 8-Litre engines can be produced in-house, together with superchargers, gearboxes, clutches, differentials, axles and braking components.

The principle is not necessarily to redesign a vintage Bentley simply because modern engineering makes it possible.

Where the original design remains appropriate, it can be respected. Where experience has identified a genuine weakness, engineering provides the opportunity to address it sympathetically. The important part is understanding the difference.

Competition inevitably contributes to that knowledge.

Kingsbury founder Ewen Getley has raced vintage Bentleys extensively, while the next generation of the family is increasingly involved. His daughters Anna and Louisa Getley have competed in their family's 1924 Bentley, including at Le Mans Classic, continuing a relationship with these cars that extends beyond maintaining them as historical objects.

That may ultimately explain the character of the workshop.

While vintage Bentley remains central to Kingsbury Racing, that depth of restoration and engineering experience is increasingly being applied to other significant motor cars. The workshop has recently expanded its activities to include the maintenance and support of machinery such as Alfa Romeo 8Cs, Lagondas and Jaguar E-Types, extending the same approach to cars from other important chapters of pre- and post-war motoring history.

A Bentley preserved in remarkably original condition, another rebuilt for touring and another prepared to race through the night can all represent legitimate approaches to the same marque. What changes is the intervention required to allow each car to retain what matters about it.

For Kingsbury Racing, preservation therefore does not necessarily mean making a vintage Bentley new again.

Sometimes it means knowing what to leave untouched. Sometimes it requires rebuilding what has disappeared. And sometimes it means manufacturing the component that allows a century-old motor car to complete another race, rally or journey.

The important thing is that it can still make the journey.

That combination of preservation judgement, traditional restoration, in-house engineering and knowledge developed through actually using vintage Bentleys is why Kingsbury Racing is a trusted and HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Kingsbury Racing Shop Ltd
Oxfordshire, England
+44 (0)7803 206536