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Vintage Racing Services
Stratford, CT
By Richard S. Carey
Victory Lane
Volume 16, No. 3
March 2001
Vintage Racing Services started as a hobby, an extension of founder Kent Bain’s racing enthusiasm. “I had an Austin-Healey that I raced years ago. I’d show up and one thing would break, then another financial disaster . . . and now I can’t get home . . . I was an industrial designer, interested in trying to design cars, but designing products. I concentrated on design for a few years and then came back to this car business just out of interest. We started Automotive Restorations Inc. in 1977.
Vintage Racing Services Inc. is a development of Automotive Restorations Inc. Both have grown a lot since then, now employing 42 full time, xix technicians, plus “a whole network of weekend helpers” occupy Vintage Racing’s 8,000 square foot race preparation shop.
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Key people are Brian Rechtiene, Brad Capshaw and Ian Macpherson, all or any of whom you are likely to find at events throughout the U.S. vintage racing season.
Automotive Restorations’ shop is housed in 12,000 square feet along with the general office and a small car sales showroom on Barnum Avenue in Stratford. It performs general sports and classic car restorations, has an extensive body panel forming and assembly business (including making the bodies for Cunningham’s C4R re-creations) and full interior trim shop.
The 20,000 square foot facility, just up the Housatonic River in Derby, houses Vintage Racing Services’ car sales operation run by Paul Lane along with a sales-related service facility. Two warehouses totaling another 20,000 square feet support all facets of the operation. “Car sales in this business isn’t like being a Toyota dealer where you have the three models that are the big sellers, and ‘we can get you any color you want.’ You have to have the actual car, so we have a large number of cars stored . . . Inventory is a mix. There’s affair bit of our stuff, and a good bit of consignment. We’re the U.S. Elva licensee. We manufacture Elva parts and between Roger Dunbar and ourselves we service the whole vintage Elva community.” Road car inventory during our visit ran from a 1930 Buick Roadster through a selection of Corvettes to an ’87 Testarossa.
The race offering is even more extensive, including various (as you’d expect) Elvas, Lolas, Loti, Turners, a LeMans Triumph Spitfire coupe and even a Volvo 444 Rally car.
Vintage Racing Services supports the race cars of 35 to 40 customers, about half of whom leave their complete car preparation, storage and maintenance to the company with turnkey delivery to the events they attend. The rest entrust Vintage Racing Services with pre-season preparation and major work. With four full-size transporters and several smaller rigs, VRS can support up to three events in a weekend. To keep everything straight, they have developed a system to ensure each car is fully supported and prepared with its unique squares as well as general race support items. “We build a customer’s spares inventory. It goes with the car and has all the key pieces: electrical pieces, fuel pump, fuel injection metering unit, drive belt . . . Post race we check the car then go through each box and get everything back up to spec. This structure is the key to this whole thing working smoothly and avoids schedule binds,” Bain described. “Our customers can’t waste their weekends. They want it to work ‘out of the box.’ The want it to run properly and reliably. Our people and the system we’ve developed is what makes it happen.”
Vintage Racing Services also rents vintage race cars, belonging both to themselves and their customers. “We rent a number of cars we support, so we know what’s in them, and we qualify drivers accordingly. It’s worked very well. It also lets people who are vintage racers already and who want to try, say, a formula car, not commit themselves until they have had a weekend,” Bain said. Rental inventory changes constantly and can range from a Triumph Spitfire to a March 792 Formula 2. The cost for a fully prepared car on fresh tires, including required track support and post-event checkout, starts about $2,000 for a production car or Formula Junior at a two-day Lime Rock weekend and can run up to $5,000 for a three-day weekend with the F2-March at a more distant track. Not chicken feed, but a lot cheaper than buying the car and then finding you don’t like it, or are uncomfortable in the class.
“It’s an intense business,” Bain said, “you have to get to know the car; you have to know its weaknesses; you have to engineer a lot of the systems if you’re going to refine these things. Despite the fact these cars were built years ago, and theoretically they should be all refined in the vintage racing context it doesn’t seem to work that way. You end up constantly settling. Development on a race car, no matter how old it is, just never ends.”
Enthusiasm, attention to detail, organization and preparation are apparent throughout Vintage Racing Services, reflecting the enthusiasm and dedication of a business built out of personal passion, and built on the hard lessons learned in shoestring racing.
Bain noted, “We do a remarkably consistent business now . . . There were quite a few lean years, but when you do something that’s of interest to you that’s not such a problem. It’s a better way to live life . . . as long as you’re doing something you enjoy I think your days are generally good.” |
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