Tom Walkinshaw's son says 'goal' is TWR road car with brand relaunch

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?'”

It’s difficult to get Fergus to commit to almost any details on the project – what type of cars it might be producing, volume numbers, wider plans – suggesting that the recent press release and one-page website might be a thinly veiled appeal for funding to help things along before the first car is revealed.

He does however expand on the philosophy behind his apparent plans.

“It was about wanting to bring back some of the TWR heritage do something different, something unique – to be able to offer a lot of what other companies can’t or don’t want to do at the moment,” he explains.

“We want to focus very highly upon the engineering and the quality behind our products, so we actually produce the best thing we think is possible.

“We don’t want to be limited like a mainstream car manufacturer to a certain design or brand shape.”

Tom Walkinshaw first made his name as a team boss and engineering force when masterminding Jaguar’s works touring car operations in the early ’80s, before leading it to Le Mans glory and then moving into F1.

In the grand prix world he had success at Benetton and Ligier in ’90s before taking over Arrows, while his Walkinshaw V8 Supercar effort (now Walkinshaw Andretti United) became a leading light Down Under – all while TWR producing what was then probably the world’s fastest estate (the Volvo 850) in the BTCC.

As well as this, there were the aforementioned road car projects, often spin-offs resulting from the on-track success. Fergus says he wants to channel that passion for performance by getting TWR the credit he believes it deserves.

“There’s so many things that my Dad and TWR were involved with in motor sport and the road car world beyond as well,” he says. “While there weren’t really any cars that had a TWR badge on them as the manufacturer, so many owed what they were to Dad’s company – [a TWR-badged road car] is one of the goals, but we’re still open to working with other manufacturers too.”

There are almost too many cars to choose from when you look for a favourite through the TWR pantheon, but when pressed Fergus does offer at least one machines which could get the rebooted-marque’s treatment.

“Something like an XJR-9, but a road car, would be very cool,” he says. “It’s not what we’re doing right now, but that could be a pretty cool idea.

“I think Dad’d be impressed by how far we’ve come”

“As a favourite, all the Le Mans Jags are up there for me – and I do have a real soft spot for the Rover Vitesse as well.”

In carrying on the legacy of his late father, there’s a clearly a lot of emotion involved for Fergus – manifested in the cars he wants to produce.

“From the going round the workshops with Dad as a [child], just being around and seeing all of the projects he was working on – and now looking looking back on all the history of it – there’s so much that was going on.

“I think he’d be impressed by how far we’ve come with this project in such a short space of time.”