Rebuild, restore, renew: Inside Ferrari experts GTO Engineering

Driven by a desire to run his own show, Lyon started doing engines and gearboxes in a garage in the north-west London suburb of Northwood, because there was no room for anything bigger. Soon he moved to a slightly larger place that his brother owned, coining the name GTO Engineering.

“I liked the engineering as much as the cars,” he explains. “And it was fun meeting the characters who owned them.” After a few successful years, a friend with a parallel business, Tony Merrick, suggested that Lyon take him over – customers, buildings and staff (15 to 20 of them) at a place near Reading called Scarlett’s Farm. It was a big leap, but it worked, and GTO forged ahead for a dozen years until it became obvious that it needed more space again.

That’s when it moved to its current place, formerly the headquarters of a civil engineering firm. It’s a big site, complete with a lush surrounding lawn, gardens and even tennis courts, but when Lyon takes you on a tour – through assembly shops, service centres, machine shops, restoration bays and a new CAD department, it’s perfectly clear that there’s now no spare space here either. Perhaps one day those tennis courts will have to go…

Far from a simple, unchanging concept, the old Ferrari business needs reinvention every few years, says Lyon; and because he has learned that, he has no fear of it. When he started, the business was fairly evenly split between service, restoration, parts supply and racing, but as time has passed, things have changed.

“I don’t much like racing,” says Lyon. “You’re often dealing with egos bigger than the talent available. If they win, they tend to forget how it happened, which can be frustrating. So these days, our race projects tend to be for friends we know.”

The servicing business used to concentrate on older cars that official Ferrari dealers had lost interest in, but nowadays Lyon is finding that owners of more recent models also appreciate the GTO touch. Restoration is a smaller business than it once was, both because most great cars have now been ‘done’ and because owners don’t wear them out.

However, parts is a global business these days, explains Lyon. The Ferrari factory isn’t interested in making components for Colombo V12s any more, so GTO makes them instead. It can build you an entirely new engine, using new casting and ancillary components made in the UK and just like new.

The firm doesn’t change anything (“copy an original and it will work”), although owners of original 3.0-litre 250 models are often happy to install ostensibly identical (but sometimes 4.0-litre) GTO Engineering engines, leaving their original units safely unused on a stand.

“We’ve become known for supplying all the difficult bits people need,” says Lyon. “We have a base in Los Angeles these days, which helps, and there’s similar demand in the Middle East and Asia. We buy parts stock from anywhere in the world, and we make components or have them made. We do complete gearboxes as well as engines. In fact, everything except the carburettors, which are still original Webers.”

However, one unexpected coup has been the unprecedented demand that Lyon has generated for two re-engineered ‘Revival’ models built by GTO using donor vehicles: the 250 GT SWB and the 250 Testa Rossa. The donor cars provide chassis, engine, gearbox and as much running gear as possible (GTO’s people will help you source, say, a 330 GT for the job). Then after a few months of workshop time, out pops a car that’s more or less unmistakable from the original 250 – except that it’s considerably better built. (GTO Revival editions carry secret serial numbers so that they can never be passed off as original.)

A GTO Revival car represents spectacular value: find a donor Ferrari, then fork out over £750,000 or so and you will soon have a machine that looks as good as, and can be used more easily than, a 1960s Ferrari classic that’s now worth many tens of millions. Last year, GTO built about 20 of them – mostly 250 SWBs.

In the past, Ferrari officialdom has been famously snooty in its dealings with nonfranchised specialists, and even today the sides are careful about how they deal with one another. But you can definitely sense a softening of attitude on the Italian side, if only because GTO is such a handy source of beautifully remanufactured, extremely rare parts and forged front suspension pieces, for example. Ferrari Classiche buys from GTO, albeit always through a third party.

But what of the future? Even the supply of donor V12 Ferraris must run out some time soon, not least because these cars are acquiring their own rarity value. Lyon is already 18 months into a second new plan, even bolder than the first. He wants GTO to build its own classic Ferrari-esque car, called the Squalo (see right), charge £1.5 million per copy and have it on the market in 2023.

As we walk back through GTO’s engine-building workshop, Lyon casually lifts the cover over a Testa Rossa engine, showing how amazingly compact it is, even in modern terms. It also weighs only 180kg, he says, which again compares pretty well with many of the latest units.