Heritage
A TWR badge on a car meant it was one to watch. Tom Walkinshaw Racing was a force on, and off the racetrack and its reach spanned the globe. Spying those three letters meant you were in for a show…
After TWR founder, Tom Walkinshaw, discovered his talent behind the wheel in the 1960s he realised that competition wasn’t a desire, but a need. After Ford gave him a big break, he founded TWR to run, develop, build, and race cars for manufacturers all over the world. Touring cars, Endurance, Rally, and more, TWR made world beating racers. Not content with the track, TWR put its considerable skill into plenty of road cars, too – the Jaguar XJ220, Renault Clio V6, and Aston Martin DB7 owe their success to TWR.
The secret to TWR’s success was its people. Tom Walkinshaw worked hard, and his people did too. He knew the key to creating incredible machines was having the right team behind them – it didn’t matter if they needed to build a supercar, BTCC racer, Le Mans competitor, or… anything else, if the people creating them were right, the result would be a winner.
A drive to triumph over the competition, combined with the willingness and ability to push boundaries as far as they could go, the right team, and a dash of style meant TWR put drivers and cars where others couldn’t. TWR’s cars were a perfect blend of power, handling, and dynamics, and everyone who saw them do their thing knew it.
Vision
To move something with a legacy like TWR forward you need to look at what came before and honour it properly. That’s what we’re doing today. We have the same drive to succeed, to push boundaries, and to create cars that will put on show.
Our mission is as it always has been: to build drivers’ cars with the same passion and visceral performance that established TWR in the past. That’s our guiding principle. Though we’re going to do it the TWR way. We’ll be looking at cars that had an association with TWR, that have a legacy, and we’re going to create our own take on them.
We’ll be doing it all our own way, too. In house design, in house engineering solutions, in house knowhow will lead to truly excellent cars that’ll be coveted the world over. Our dynamics will be our own, our engines will be ours. Everything that can be done in house, will be done. We’re not doing it the easy way, we’re doing it the TWR way.
Looking at TWR’s past, there are plenty of collaborations to choose from. Our journey is starting with the Supercat, a modern TWR take on the Jaguar XJS. Where we go next… well, that would be telling. Our cars will be built in the spirit of every TWR that ever turned a wheel, and we’ll push to create things that, if we weren’t around, simply wouldn’t exist in a normal world. Be that on road, or on track.
Process
Our facility in Newbury, UK, is the sort of place engineers – amateur or professional – dream of. Here, imaginations run wild, ideas are formed, tweaked, and acted upon… all under one roof. We do things the TWR way, which means we take the right route to create the best possible car, not the car that’s easy to make. What does that mean? Everything we can do under one roof, we do under our roof.
Once we’ve decided to build something a certain way, we don’t send it away to be created by someone else’s engineers and put our name to it. We’ll spend the time, do the work, and make sure that everything with a TWR stamp on it has been made right here by the TWR team. Of course, that approach is in TWR’s nature. The company that came before would develop its own complex, fascinating solutions to problems no one else had seen coming, deploy them all on site, and go on to win the trophies that mattered all over the world. We’re cut from the same cloth.
Let’s take a look at our engine. We started with a tried and tested Jaguar V12, but we wanted to push it further than ever before. To find the right power to suit the car, and its drivers, we had to test, tweak, develop, and fettle until we got it right. We wouldn’t trust such a job to anyone other than ourselves, and neither should you. Similarly, the Supercat’s subframes were conceptualised, designed, tested, and built here. Not simply one prototype, but every single one will be made on site.
Occasionally we work with trusted suppliers. We’re proud to work with the best in the world, as only they’ll do for a TWR car. In those cases, rest assured that the preparation, design, and testing was all done right here at TWR’s home. We’re proud of what we can do here, and you’ll see why when you encounter a Supercat for the first time. Every inch of the car is a TWR, and every inch of TWR comes from here.
