Prepared For The Worst

Preparing vintage cars for gruelling transcontinental rallies is one of our favourite tasks

Kingsbury Racing Shop carries out a wide variety of specialist automotive engineering, but one of our most rewarding types of work involves preparing cars for historic rallies.

Several of our clients use their pre-war vintage machines and classic cars for long-distance rallying. The events they take part in vary wildly. At one end they are gently competitive timed road-based events, like those offered by Itineris. These rallies are made up of stages around beautiful parts of the UK and beyond, driving from one luxury overnight stay to the next. At the other end of the scale are the hardcore, gruelling trials, like the ‘P2P’, the HERO ERA Rally organisation’s 14,988km Peking to Paris.

In 2025, the Peking to Paris was completed in a ‘solo’ record-breaking time for a vintage car by our friend and client Tomas driving a Kingsbury-prepped 1927 Bentley Speed Model 3/4½ (pictured above). By solo, we mean no one else in the car to share the driving/navigating/chatting or inevitable running repairs caused by the rough, off-road trails.

At the time of posting, that same car, with another Kingsbury-prepared Bentley, a long bonnet 4½, are both on a ship heading to South America for its latest extreme test – the Gaucho Trail Motor Challenge.

Photo courtesy of HERO-ERA

Our rally preparation includes thorough inspection and replacement of key mechanical components. The inspection includes NDT – non-destructive testing – of half-shafts, brake shoes and stub axles.

Engines are rebuilt in our Bicester Motion engine shop, while suspension is uprated with the knowledge and experience we have gained and refined over years of ensuring cars survive days of battering through the Mongolian outback. After all, a broken leaf spring is a rally-ending failure.

We also fit specialist timing equipment and auxiliary electrics, if the rally demands it. We assemble spares packages and toolkits, while thinking hard about what can go wrong, without loading the cars up with so many tools and spares that something probably will go wrong. We also include specific equipment we manufacture in-house, like our ever-popular Bentley hub pullers.

We are best known for our work on pre-war Bentleys, but we have rally-prepped a wide variety of machinery, including cars made by Lagonda, Chevrolet, Fraser-Nash BMW, Riley and more.

Kingsbury can prepare your vehicle, or assess cars you’re considering buying, while offering advice and contacts to guide you towards the kind of event that would best suit you and your expectations.

On that subject, HERO-ERA have just launched a new rally called Vintage Caucasus. Open to vintage cars only, not the usual mixture of vintage and classic, it sounds like it’ll be one to remember. It’s scheduled for Easter 2029, which gives us time to start planning and prepping.

Get in touch if this talk of rallying has given you an itch you need to scratch.