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It’s the start of another busy week here at Francis Tuthill’s Porsche Workshop, in Wardington, near Banbury.
With so many of our rally cars en route to Africa for the East African Safari Classic, one could be forgiven for thinking things would be quiet around the place, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In our bodyshop is a beautiful little Blood Orange 2.4S that is having some finishing touches applied following some restorative work. A classic Mercedes ‘Pagoda’ roadster has just arrived from the USA for minor cosmetic attention.
In the fabrication workshop, the chaps are continuing their new build of a rally car shell. Seam welding has been finished and they are now cutting templates for body reinforcements, which will be welded on over the e-coated shell, currently bolted to one of our rotisseries.
The road workshop is tackling the usual selection of routine servicing and tuning on cars including a 356 Roadster, a 911 SC Targa, a 964 Carrera 2 Cabriolet and a very smart 996 coupe. We also have some Volkswagen and Skoda cars coming in later this week.
We are just preparing to run in a brand new engine, built by Tuthills for a staff member at 911 & Porsche World magazine. This motor is in a 3.2 Carrera Targa and features our in-house EFI package of Jenvey individual throttle bodies and Omex engine management. The Jenvey/Omex Tuthill package is designed to update any older-style injection system (K-Jet, Motronic etc) to modern, mappable EFI, and was featured in the magazine in 2008 – the article can be downloaded in pdf form here. Once the engine has been run in, we’ll start the mapping process, to ensure it runs even better than it looks.
In the rally workshop, the boys are putting the finishing touches to refreshing a pair of classic rally cars that have recently had livery changes, and are heading off into storage ahead of next year’s British championship.
In the engine workshop, our master technicians are working on a very promising 2.9 high compression engine to go in an early 911 which the owner intends to use daily. This will be an interesting project. We are also building a high compression 2 litre motor for an old friend of our workshops, who has been competing in regularity rallies in the same Sand Beige SWB car for over 13 years. It still looks just as handsome as the first day we saw it, all those years ago.
Elsewhere, work continues on our parts system update, where we are putting our full range of race and rally parts online and available to buy over the Internet. Our European distributors, Twin Spark Racing, are just about to ignite also, as their website gets ready to go live.
So things are going well here at Wardington, but we are always keen to make new friends. If you’d like to discuss anything you feel we might be able to help with on your classic Porsche, VW, Audi, Skoda or anything else for that matter, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01295 750 514.
