The specialist: Tolman Engineering

By Charlie Calderwood

| 20 Oct 2025

Classic & Sports Car – The specialist: Tolman Engineering

If a business studies lecturer were ever looking for a case study in the importance of flexibility, Tolman Engineering is surely it.

When Classic & Sports Car last visited the firm in 2012, it had become one of the leading specialists in Lotus Elites.

Now, with the Tolman Edition 205 GTI receiving universal acclaim for putting new hot hatches to shame in the pages of Autocar et al, it has adopted another personality: maker of great restomods of the modern classic era.

These changes have rarely followed any great masterplan, but been forced by changing weathers.

This recommissioned Ford RS 200 has been given a new ECU by Tolman Engineering

COVID-19 and its resultant lockdowns in 2020 were the last point of inflection for the company.

Prior to that, it had been moving from strength to strength doing small-scale development work for manufacturers (none of which can be mentioned specifically), running racing teams for other parties (including McLaren’s driver development programme) and competing in GT racing itself.

“McLaren basically stopped overnight,” says founder and director Chris Tolman. “We had to trim down our full-time staff from 12 to four.”

A Peugeot 306 GTI intake manifold is reworked for a 205 GTI

Like many others who were stuck with what to do during those closed-off months of 2020, Tolman turned to a project that had been waiting in the shed – Chris’ own Peugeot 205 GTI.

As the son of a Peugeot dealer, he had owned plenty of 205 GTIs in the past and bought one prior to COVID-19 for his own purposes.

“It was just a little bit of nostalgia at first,” he says. “I thought ‘we could put a modern ECU in it, we do that with everything else’ and we just started doing improvements from there, really.”

Chris Tolman’s personal Peugeot 205 GTI became the prototype for his firm’s carefully crafted restomods

That development car (the black example pictured above) would help to form the now established Tolman method.

“We didn’t want to change the capacity of the car, because that’s not allowed in a lot of countries,” says Chris.

“We also wanted to keep the alloy block, while lots of later Peugeot engines use iron blocks.”

Instead of the well-proven route of swapping in the 16-valve XU10 engine (from a Peugeot 405 Mi16 Mk2) or a later, turbocharged unit, Tolman re-engineered the cylinder head from a 306 GTI to fit the 205’s powerplant.

Chris Tolman founded Tolman Engineering in 2007, and it has since become a byword for upgraded Peugeot 205 GTIs

On-road drivability, handling dynamics and tidiness of installation were the aim of the build, not cheap power.

Not only did orders start coming in for the tweaked Peugeot 205 GTI, but customers soon approached the company to restomod their cars in the Tolman mould.

That has so far included a Mini Cooper ‘S’, while in the workshop today we find a BMW E30 3 Series Touring.

Tolman sourced a magnesium-alloy block for the BMW’s M20 straight-six to push the weight distribution rearwards, but also insisted on wheels of no larger than 16in diameter: “It’s not about making the most powerful car, that’s easy. It’s about making a really good road car.”

This Mitsubishi Galant is an echo of Chris Tolman’s seven years at RalliArt, from 2000

Among recent projects are a Ford Escort XR3i and Talbot Sunbeam Lotus, and Chris is waiting for the chance for two more he’d like to do: a Renault 5 Turbo and a Lotus Esprit Turbo.

“You could do an Esprit with a small turbo, a single plenum and an ECU. There’s a lot of room to improve it and you’d have a great-driving car,” he says.

“We’ve always done other things [beside motorsport], but the 205 made it clear that lots of people didn’t know that we did,” continues Chris.

“It seems we have now hit a note with those people.”

Images: Jack Harrison