CIRCUIT TRAINING
From Touring Cars to single-seaters, the bespoke approach is the same from this talented two-man team
If you wanted to track down the saloon racers that appear at the Goodwood Members’ Meeting, AWS Engineering would be a good place to start. Alan Strachan worked on these Touring Cars when they were new – for Andy Rouse Engineering, Peugeot and Prodrive – but, as well as knowing the cars intimately (and individually), his forte is that he can remanufacture unobtainable parts such as the race-legal brakes and wheels the cars have to run.
It has morphed along the way from a pure race-prep company into a precision-engineering outfit, but keeps a foot in each camp. AWS is staffed by Alan and his son Andrew, who does much of the spannerwork while Alan reverseengineers parts using his experience as a freelance design engineer.
His beautifully crafted four-pot Group A calipers have an authentic matt appearance that matches the cast originals, but in these small quantities it’s more cost-effective to machine them from billet on the Cnc-guided mills then blast them back to a dull finish. They won’t be porous, either. The same goes for the intricately machined basket-weave BBS and Ronal-type wheel centres, which take five hours each to finish. “In the past six months I’ve created more aluminium swarf than ever,” says Alan. There’s even a 3D printer to ‘proof’ new parts before committing them to metal.
Race prep still goes on, too: the place is piled with Touring Car bits, as well as two D-types – one blue, one green. Two of the latter’s crunched noses are in the yard: “One from Goodwood and one from Donington a couple of years before that, with the previous owner.” The former is ‘545’, the Watkins Glen Gp-winner, which Bill Sadler once bought for $200. Single-seaters here include a 1981 Fittipaldi. A one-of-three Taydec 2-litre sports-prototype is in, and a Rondel is having its rear suspension tidied: “People ask, ‘Have you had any dealings with one of these?’ but at the end of the day they’ve all got a wheel at each corner.”
There is a pair of Sierras (one of them actually a Merkur XR4TI), a period BMW 635CSI and another in build from a bare shell, plus a BMW 320i, the last Rouse BTCC Mondeo… and a couple more that we aren’t allowed to talk about. Two SD1S – one of them chassis 14, the most successful of its type – remind you of the famous 1983 rocker debacle, when TWR was stripped of the British Saloon Car Championship (both these, a Group A and a Group 1 are legal, Strachan assures us). A rotten SD1 out back was bought for its door cards and back axle: “Repro crown wheels and pinions are too soft.” There are various motors in bits, too: BMW ‘six’, Rover V8, Ford Cosworth and BDA.
“I started as an apprentice at an Austin Rover dealer, but round the corner was Bob Houghton Ferrari, so I went there,” says Alan. “My first Touring Car job was on a Maserati Biturbo, then I went to Rouse in the late ’80s. I set up AWS in 1996, mainly doing design work, but since then a lot of cars have come out of the woodwork.
“I never planned it to be like this, but it has snowballed,” Strachan continues. “Andrew grew up with it; he was always helping out around race cars, though he went to work for someone else before he came to join me.”
There’s some restoration going on between the racecar work, too, such as a standard Rover P5B – next to the ex-marathon de la Route P6B: “That’s sitting there ready to race.”
“It ebbs and flows, but restoration work is quite nice,” Strachan concludes. “I quite like building new cars. The only things we don’t do are major bodywork, paint and anodising.”