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Pro Alloy are known all over the world for the excellent products they offer, so we asked MD, Alex Osborn, what keeps them at the top of their game…

We catch up with Pro Alloy's Alex Osborn for a quick chat.

What’s the history of Pro Alloy – how and where did it all start?

Pro Alloy was formed by the current MD Alex Osborn and his brother-in-law Wayne Clayden. The pair teamed up at the beginning of 2004 to form Pro Alloy Motorsport, with the company fast becoming renowned for their innovative ideas and designs, and rapidly developing into one of the UK’s most respected companies within their field.

Wayne sadly passed away in 2015 following a short battle with cancer, but since then Alex has continued to expand and develop the business, with the now 20-plus strong team filling their UK manufacturing facility in Suffolk.

What are the most popular Fords that customers come to you for help with?

We’ve always had a very large and loyal customer base within the Ford community, which started right back in 2004 with all the Cosworth and RS Turbo products. Even after all these years we still have quite a high demand for this range of products. In more recent times, the Focus RS has proved to be an excellent car to be involved with, starting right back in 2004 with the Mk1. We were involved with a number of really big-power Mk1 RS builds which proved to be a great development platform for many of the Mk1 products we’re still producing fifteen years later.

The Mk2 RS was probably one of our biggest-selling Ford product ranges – during 2008 and 2009 we were heavily involved with Ford and mountune on the intercooler design and development for the Focus RS500, and went on to produce all the intercoolers for the RS500 which were supplied directly to the plant in Germany.

We have more recently been very busy developing and testing a growing range of products for the Mk3 RS. Running our own development car has enabled us to carry out some really extensive performance and durability tests over the last three years, allowing us to develop a fairly extensive selection of parts for the Mk3 platform.

The range of Mk7 Fiesta ST products we have developed is pretty impressive too, with this great little car proving to be really popular with such a broad range of customers. We’ve worked very closely with a number of the tuning companies developing and refining all the parts we produce for the Mk7, and have also benefited from having our own track car to help us figure out what works and what doesn’t. Even though the Mk7 has been around for a number of years now, we are still seeing really strong sales on a number of the parts we produce for it.

You’re currently developing products for the Mk8 Fiesta ST, aren’t you? What’s in the pipeline for the future?

A number of the tuning companies have already found some great potential with tuning the Mk8, so we’re starting to see a growing requirement for a really good intercooling solution. We are currently working in conjunction with SCC Performance and their development Mk8 Fiesta, so hope to have a new intercooler in place very shortly.

What do you see as the future of Ford tuning?

The evolution over the last few years of smaller-capacity turbocharged production cars has actually been really good for the performance road car market, as most of these cars have fantastic tuning potential. This has enabled Pro Alloy to expand our range of products over a much broader number of vehicle platforms and has given us a much greater range of product development opportunities for the performance road car element of the business. We’re even involved with hybrid technology too, providing our heat exchanger technology for motor, battery and inverter cooling, even to supercar manufacturers such as Rimac.

What’s in store for Pro Alloy over the next five years or so?

Things are actually really exciting for us at the moment. We have recently put significant investment into our production facility here in the UK, developing a new manufacturing plant for building our radiator, intercooler and oil cooler heat exchanger cores in-house. This now enables us to offer a broader range of products as well as giving us greater control over quality and lead times. This facility will enable us to further expand our existing business, but also grow into other industry sectors.