We’re halfway through the year and cars packing Xtrac gearboxes have already won three of the biggest events in motorsport: the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans. In some ways, this is down to circumstances, as the company’s ’boxes are mandatory in NASCAR and IndyCar, while the vast majority of the WEC grid also uses its kit. But, to twist a well-known phrase, in this business you make your own circumstances.
And Xtrac has been doing just that for as long as it has been making transmissions, which is close to 40 years now.
It all started with former Hewland engineer, Mike Endean, in 1984, and a clever, changeable bias, hydraulic 4x4 system that was fitted to a Ford Escort Rallycross car. Since then, the company has produced over 1200 unique gearbox designs, in the process cementing itself as one of the world’s go-to high-end motorsport transmission specialists.
Peter Digby has led the company since the mid-1980s and is now its president, with CEO, Adrian Moore, in charge of day-to-day business. Moore first came to Xtrac in 1992 as a design engineer, then returned as technical director in 1999, after a three-year spell in Formula 1, at both Ferrari and McLaren.
Steady growth
‘In the ’90s, when I first joined, it was 60 people,’ remembers Moore. ‘Mike Endean was still designing gearboxes on a drawing board, and I was one of the first in the company to use CAD. We had a very small engineering team, which has grown a lot since then, as the whole company has.’
Indeed, today it employs close to 400 people in the UK and US, with around 100 of those working in the engineering team, while it moved from its original base in Wokingham to Finchampstead in 1986, and then to its present 125,000ft.sq hi-tech facility in
