Father and son bring championship classic car back to the race track

A car which won the British Touring Car Championship in 1960 will return to the race track thanks to a father and son labour of love.

Trevor Parfitt has owned the Austin A40 Farina, which took Cambridge GP George 'Doc' Shepherd to his BTCC win, for 50 years but with his son Simon and their team, at the family-owned motor racing and restoration specialist Scott Automotive, in Herringswell, it has been given a complete rebuild.

They have finished the work in time for it to be shown at the BTCC’s 60th anniversary celebrations at Silverstone Classic festival on July 20 to 22.

Trevor's connection with it began in the 1960s when he was a member of Cambridge Car Club and saw Doc win the BTCC in the grey and black A40.

A couple of years later, a friend had a red and black A40, but it was not until five years later when another acquaintance bought it and showed Trevor the original log book that he realised it was Doc's winning car, having been repainted and given a new registration number.

Trevor told the Adrian Flux Forever Cars blog: “I drove it for three years and it was great fun. I loved it then and I still do."

He put the A40 into storage around 1970, but it wasn’t until 2008 that father and son began working on a project to bring the A40 back to life with a ground-up rebuild.

Trevor added:“We’ve spent long enough building it, and now it needs to be used. It would be a shame for it to get damaged, but it’s a racing car, not a museum piece."