engines for Formula 1 teams. Working in the top echelons of motorsport, and the precision and speed required to meet the requirements of F1, set Swindon up for numerous other high-profile motorsport endeavours. And also, the demands of mass manufacturers.‘ We have a good reputation out there in the world of powertrain for being able to turn around things that are complex in record time.’ Raphaël has expanded Swindon and set up a site in his home country, France, so the company can respond to the needs of race teams and manufacturers in the UK and Europe.
The scale of the demands from each customer base is quite different, though.‘ What we don’ t do, is we don’ t produce thousands of production engines here. But we will do the prototypes for those thousands of production engines.
‘ Obviously, we assemble our own engines.’ That’ s the race engines and anything that’ s relatively low volume.‘ We do that very thoroughly, at a very detailed level. We use all sorts of documentation, records and measurements to make sure all of the dimensions are recorded. And we can look back to them once an engine comes back to be serviced.
‘ We have two testbeds, steady state dynos, with a good level of equipment that allows us to have a high level of control, so that engines are tested in stable and understandable conditions. And with these conditions, we can vary and control variation as well.’
This equipment, while useful for building engines, allows Swindon to develop new engines. Or, as we saw in Issue 4 of the Engine Rebuilder when we covered Swindon’ s four-valve air-cooled Porsche heads, major new engine components.‘ It allows us to develop calibration. We do durability testing, performance, economy, drivability, any aspect of engine testing. Other than emissions. Not because we don’ t care, because that’ s another level of equipment in terms of expense – it’ s five times the cost for a dyno test cell that will do emission testing.’
Swindon Powertrain has been involved with BTCC since 2010
The Excelr8 i30 N Fastback BTCC cars are powered by a Hyundai engine developed for racing by Swindon Powertrain
Summer 2026 The Engine Rebuilder 47