Craft work
Some fabricated racecar parts can be so beautifully crafted that they could easily be mistaken for sculpture and exhibited in an art gallery. Which is a fitting testimony to those working at the top level of this profession. People like Joe Lofthouse, for instance, who has been involved in high-end motorsport fabrication for close to two decades, in that time creating and welding parts for just about every major motorsport discipline.
Lofthouse is now manufacturing director at fabrication and race preparation outfit, Venture Engineering (see box out on p78), but on most days can still be found wielding a welding torch, a craft he first came to enjoy while taking a motorsport engineering course at Banbury and Bicester College (then Oxford and Cherwell Valley College) in the early 2000s.
‘The course started off as very generic engineering, where you’re learning all aspects of motorsport,’ Lofthouse remembers. ‘Then after about six months, they said we had to specify what we wanted to do, and so I chose welding. That meant once a week we had a day in the bays getting welding experience.’
Lofthouse then left the course to take up an apprenticeship at F3 team, Alan Docking Racing, where
