While Tom passed away in 2010, Fergus focused on building his own racing career – doing so with his own FW Motorsport team racing Ginettas. He explains how that led him on to eventually relaunching TWR.
“I worked with a couple of race outfits – spannering and then moving onto engineering – before then running my own team,” he says.
“Then we saw a bit of a market switch where people weren’t so keen on on the motor sport side of things, it was moving towards performance road cars, track-day toys which could still be used on the road – so we started to focus on that.”
Previously the company has taken on commissions, but the success of Fergus’ business had given him the confidence for a role reversal, further boosting business prospects by taking on the TWR name. This has no association with WAU V8 squad, of which his brother Ryan is a director.
“[Previously] we dealt with most of the weird and wonderful projects that most normal workshops wouldn’t take on,” Fergus says. “We would be approached by a customer that wanted to make their car more powerful, quicker, go round corners better – and we put together a proposal of how to do that.
“Whereas TWR has been set up as more of an engineering company. So we’re taking on special projects from other businesses [he doesn’t say what these are] – and we’re doing our own our own vehicle projects.
“But they’re being engineered and designed how we would do it, rather than someone coming here and going, ‘I’ve got an BMW M3, can you make it quicker?’”