Fergus Walkinshaw, TWR co-founder, has an obvious connection to the marque. His father, Tom, is the ‘TW’ in the first generation of TWR, and Fergus was along for as much of the fun as he could be. “Growing up I was always around cars, motorsport, and things like that. They’re part of the family – obviously because of my dad, but my mum was very much into cars as well. There was no escape from it, really.”
Walkinshaw’s upbringing with all things quick served him well. He raced motorcycles, competed in the Ginetta Juniors championship, and fixed up both his own, and others’ cars for road and track. His aptitude for all things mechanical led him to the Mechanical Engineering course at the UK’s Oxford Brookes University. Walkinshaw’s goal was to use his knowledge to set up his own race team, which, if you think about it, is something that almost certainly would have made everyone in whichever paddock he chose to compete in take notice.
In the early 2010s Walkinshaw’s motorsport business changed tack – he noticed there was more interest in modifying road cars, and building track cars than creating machines for competition. Except, being Fergus Walkinshaw, he wasn’t about bolting coilovers to MX-5s day in, day out: “We were trying to take on the weird, wonderful, and wacky projects that other garages wouldn’t touch. We always tried to stick with more unique stuff where you had to think about it, design something. We wanted to do proper engineering.”
It may seem like Walkinshaw was looking to follow in his father’s footsteps from early on, but that isn’t quite the case: “ I wanted to go my own path with it. But there was always the heritage of what my dad did in the background.”
Meeting co-founder John Kane through a rally, and establishing a relationship with him over years of building cars, Walkinshaw notes that the idea of bringing TWR back started as a simple chat that snowballed. With the Speedcat Super-GT, he adds that the company could have thrown some aftermarket bits at it and walked away, but the XJS has huge potential for growth: “To really improve it you need to deal with so many knock ons. If you up the power, you need to make it stop better. If you do one thing, you need to do more. It doesn’t help that neither me nor John can leave anything alone…”
Today, as the next generation of TWR takes its first steps, he’s excited about what comes next: “We’re not going to be a company that just does Jag, or restomods, or anything like that. We’re an engineering company that focuses on cars – road, or race. We’re not going to limit ourselves.”
