We recently took a look behind the scenes of the classic car sales business with a visit to the Classic Motor Hub in England’s Cotswolds. The Hub offers a variety of services for the classic car enthusiast, but restoration is not one of them, so this week we’re taking a look at life in the restorer’s workshop, where rusting, decaying, fading projects go in, and polished, beautifully restored classics come out.
The restorer’s art – and it is unquestionably an art – is a delicate one. In one way, and one way only, it resembles that of the hairdresser. Older readers may remember the film Educating Rita, starring the great Michael Caine and Julie Walters. Ms. Walters plays Rita, a hairdresser, confronted in one scene with a spectacularly unstylish client with mousy hair brandishing a picture of Princess Diana and demanding “I want to look like that!”, which even though such a transformation is completely impossible, Rita shrugs and gets on with it.
The classic car equivalent is, of course, when a deluded owner takes an almost irredeemably rotten, tatty, disintegrating, scruffy, rust-heap into a workshop and says “Make it look like new” – not that a ViaRETRO reader would do such a thing, obviously!
Of course, both the hairdresser and restorer can work miracles, if their client gives them an unlimited budget, but such clients are as rare as the cars they bring in for restoration, and sometimes it’s those with potentially unlimited budgets who drive the hardest bargains, which is probably how they got to accumulate their wealth in the first place.
Anyway, I digress, and this is where the comparison between a hairdresser and a classic car restorer ends. Even the most challenging hairstyle only takes a few hours whereas a full-blown restoration can run into thousands of hours and tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, as parts that cannot be sourced are individually made and cars that seemed to have turned their wheels for the last time, never to rev their engines again, burst back into life, rust free and gleaming in the sun – a resurrection, no less, and no, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
Some classic car enthusiasts are fortunate enough to possess at least some – occasionally all – the skills needed to work on their treasured cars, but most of us, including yours truly, need to call on the professionals.
Some of you will recall that die Zitrone has been the subject of some extensive work – work that I hadn’t envisaged being necessary when I bought the little yellow boxy saloon. That work was expertly carried out by Templar and Wilde, conveniently located just a few minutes’ drive from me in Hedgerley, South Buckinghamshire. When I first went to see them to talk about working on die Zitrone, parked outside was a white 1955 Mercedes Benz 300SL, so I figured if they could work on that, they could probably manage the ’02…
Over the past three years Templar and Wilde have continued to look after my BMW. I’ve come to know them fairly well, so it was good to get a couple of hours with Simon Borrell, one of the two partners – along with Keith Forrest – who started the company seven years ago in Marlow before moving to their current premises and talk about the ups and downs of life in the classic car restoration business.
Neither of them started their working lives in classic cars – Simon trained as a mechanical engineer and previously worked in the microwave tube industry, and Keith was a programme manager in construction, cabling and networking, but both men had been keenly interested in classic cars since they were young boys, and decided to turn their hobby into a business.
Initially, the duo specialised in restoring Volvo’s most stylish car – the P1800S coupé – and it was this that led to Simon and Keith’s choice of name for their business. Pretty much everyone of a certain age is familiar with The Saint, famously played by Roger Moore back in the 1960’s when the Volvo was one of Sweden’s best-known exports, before ABBA conquered the world. The original series ran successfully from 1962 to 1969 and provided excellent PR for Volvo, since Moore drove a P1800S for the length of the series’ 118 episodes. Of course, The Saint’s “real” name was Simon Templar, and the second part of the company name came from Roger Moore’s fictional partner in The Persuaders, Danny Wilde, played by Tony Curtis. Wilde tore about in a Ferrari Dino in the series (Moore’s Lord Brett Sinclair drove an Aston Martin DBS), and more than a few Dino’s have passed through the workshops of Templar and Wilde. Both The Saint and The Persuaders were seen by Simon and Keith as fun, colourful and of course retro – all of which apply to classic cars.
Restoring P1800’s became the basis of Templar and Wilde’s work with the aim of providing a superior level of restoration and the model still plays an important part in their business – you’re pretty much certain to see at least one or two in the workshops at any one time. Indeed, for a while P1800’s constituted 50% of all the work they did, but other, more demanding projects began to come their way, including restoring an Aston Martin DB5 to museum quality level, and a 1956 Porsche Speedster. In fact, Simon considers that DB5 – alongside no less than three 300SL’s – to be perhaps one of their major achievements.
The team of four at Templar and Wilde specialise in the dis-assembly/re-assembly, bodywork and mechanical aspects of restoration, sub-contracting upholstery and paintwork to local partners. Since the early days of specialising in the P1800S, you’ll now find a considerable variety of cars in their workshops at any one time, besides mine. On recent visits there’ve been an E-Type 4.2 Series 1 Coupé, a 280SL Pagoda, a 1971 Aston Martin DBS, a pair of Ferrari Dino’s, a Ferrari 512, a 1954 Sunbeam Alpine among others…
Perhaps their most demanding current project is the 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint Speciale that was discovered to be even more rotten than they expected. Parts for such a rare car are hard to find; only 1400 were built, of which just 25 were converted to RHD – and this is one. While on the subject of Alfa Romeo, Simon and Keith recently bought an orange Alfa Romeo Montreal which is being worked on between customers’ cars, with a view to putting it up for sale when completed – car sales is another (though relatively minor) aspect of T&W’s business, sometimes on commission, sometimes, like the Montreal, a car they find to restore and sell.
The team at T&W are driven by their passion for classics and their attention to detail. For example, getting the panel gaps right by cutting back rusted metal and then gradually rebuilding the panel edges. It’s painstaking work that takes time and that customers barely notice, until they look more closely, and is the kind of thing that T&W feel sets them apart.
Before and after shut lines on the boot of a 1954 Sunbeam Alpine
Their customer base is mostly in the UK, but they do occasionally ship cars overseas, particularly to other RHD markets such as Australia and New Zealand. Most of their business comes to them through word of mouth, some via their websites. Their current facilities enable them to work on up to nine cars, and whenever I’ve visited them, the workshops are full.
Nevertheless, despite the dazzling array of exotic classics the team have worked on, Simon still has one unfulfilled wish when it comes to restoration projects – he’d love to work on a Lamborghini Miura, so if you know anyone with a Miura that needs some TLC, you know where to send them…
Any excuse to show a Lamborghini Miura
It’s their own enthusiasm for classics that started them on this path, as evidenced in their own cars – Keith currently has a 1986 Porsche 944, a white 1979 911 Targa, and a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 280SL W107, though this line-up is subject to quite frequent change! In Simon’s garage sit a 1979 Ferrari 308GTB and a 1974 Lotus Europa in JPS livery, so classic cars are a major part of their non-working lives, too.
Our thanks to Templar and Wilde for their time and use of their photographs. You can find out more about Templar and Wilde and their work on their websites – https://www.templarandwildeclassics.co.uk/ and https://www.p1800specialist.com/.
