The specialist: R&J Simpson Engineering

By Charlie Calderwood

| 21 Nov 2025

Classic & Sports Car – The specialist: R&J Simpson Engineering

When former Tyrrell and Anson man – and the founder of R&J Simpson – Bob Simpson began thinking about his retirement in 2023, his business, one of only a few in the world working on aluminium racing chassis, looked set to shut its doors.

Staff had already been served their redundancy notices when Kevan McLurg heard of the company’s impending closure and organised a buyout with an American investor’s support.

Now under new management, the firm’s four employees are working on everything from Aston Martin DB5s to Shadow Formula One cars.

Crafted aluminium components await fitting at R&J Simpson Engineering in Tamworth, UK

“Is that a Lister Storm?” asks photographer Jack as we enter the R&J workshop.

Only a snapper’s eye would spot the Lister’s livery from the small sections of bodywork visible; the car is an otherwise unrecognisable hunk of aluminium honeycomb.

“It came in with a crashed chassis,” says Kevan. “We’ve scanned it digitally, but actually we learnt most about it from a guy I saw on Facebook, mentioning in a comment that he built Storms.”

The former Lister employee was paid to come up to the workshop, where he revealed secrets such as the rollcage needing to be fitted before the roof, the rear window being an upside-down Ford Fiesta item, and the roofline being copied from a Volkswagen Corrado.

An intricately finished suspension arm

R&J Simpson is best known for its work on aluminium monocoques for Formula racers, covering roughly the Cosworth DFV era of Formula One, plus countless Formula Two and Formula Three cars.

“Often we get cars sent to us that have been in a garage for 20 years or more,” says Kevan.

A rebuild with new glue and rivets can refresh a good-condition chassis in R&J’s hands, but much wear – and certainly heavy accident damage – often makes a new monocoque more practical in a restoration.

Kevan adds: “You look to try and repair, say, the floor, and find that one thing leads to another.”

An Aston Martin DB4 chassis is created on a jig; R&J has established itself as a go-to specialist for Aston DB chassis replacement

Building a fresh monocoque can take up to three months, and R&J is now one of only a handful of firms in the world capable of making them.

“There’s a whole generation of guys that have retired now,” says Kevan.

Contemporary motorsport’s move over to carbonfibre means the market for batch fabrications of spoilers, for example, has decreased, but events such as the biennial Grand Prix de Monaco Historique create spikes of work.

“People get their cars prepared for it beforehand,” says Kevan, “then a few of them will crash and we’ll be inundated afterwards.”

Aluminium monocoques are R&J Simpson Engineering’s forte

To bridge the lulls, R&J has become one of the few builders of replacement chassis for the Aston Martin DB4/5/6.

“It’s the folding of the metalwork where we bring our expertise to these,” explains Kevan.

Working in steel instead of aluminium makes for generally tougher work, and Kevan estimates that creating every panel in a chassis can take as long as a week and a half before anything is finally welded.

The firm now creates panels in batches, though, so reliable has the work become.

The R&J Simpson Engineering team. From left: Paul Lawson, Kevan McLurg, Terry Short, Stuart Walton and Alan Kesterton

The handover from Bob to R&J’s new owners was well over a year ago and the company is secure for at least another generation, but R&J’s workforce isn’t the youngest, so Kevan is keen to recruit someone to work on CAD for the company.

Asked about taking on an apprentice, however, Kevan is in two minds: “It is difficult when you are a small business – putting someone with an apprentice can stop them working at times.

“It’s a bit of a Catch-22. It’ll be sweeping the floor and just holding stuff at first, so they’ve got to have the right mentality.

“I want them to be knocking on the door rather than advertising, but I wouldn’t say no to the right person.”

Images: Jack Harrison