JACK TORDOFF OBE (1935-2021)
Rally driver and JCT600 founder dies aged 86
Yorkshire motor industry magnate, Jack Crossley Tordoff, died on 3 October aged 86 following a long illness.
Jack built up the JCT600 Motor
Group – now a
£1.3bn multi-marque franchise dealership group – from the family business, Tordoff Motors, begun by his father, Edward, in 1946. Jack left school aged 15 after the death of his father to train as a motor mechanic at the family firm; by 21 he had completed his National Service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and returning to the business with £1000 to buy out its two partners.
Car sales soon followed with Jack at the helm, and, by the late Fifties, he celebrated the success of his firm by buying a Mercedes-Benz 300 ‘Adenauer’, complete with a ‘JCT600’ registration number, which would go on to adorn the rally cars he drove competitively throughout the Sixties and Seventies, and the motor group from which he would make his fortune. He showed promising pace from the beginning of his career in a twostroke Saab and progressed to a Ford Cortina MkI in 1964, with wins in the National Molyslip Morecambe Rally and Seven Dales leading to seat time in an Escort Twin Cam MkI and another stint behind the wheel of an ex-works Saab 96 V4, the latter resulting in the Swedish’s firm’s first national British win.
Jack also gave the Porsche 911 2.7 RS its first-ever international rally pole on the 1973 Circuit of Ireland Rally. Two years later, he hung up his helmet to concentrate on the JCT600 Motor Group, now the largest private company in Yorkshire with 2300 people employed across the North East, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
He was awarded an MBE in 2007/ 2008, and an OBE in 2018, and is survived by his sons John and Ian.