Turning a passion, into a motor racing career.

From front jackman for Lewis Hamilton to operations director at vintage racing specialists Kingsbury Racing, Lewis Fox’s journey through motor racing has been unconventional to say the least.

Lewis Fox’s route into motor racing will strike a chord with plenty of readers, chiefly because his pathway was anything but conventional. He grew up in Milton Keynes in a family steeped in the sport. His father marshalled for more than four decades and worked 43 consecutive British Grands Prix, while Fox and his brothers were around workshops and circuits from an early age. In that sense, perhaps it was inevitable that he would end up in racing.

He did partial apprenticeships rather than following a clean college route, and learned by sweeping floors and picking up whatever jobs he could. But it was workshops where he felt most at home. From a young age he remembers doing exams in the morning and then heading to work in the afternoon.

Education did not really fit. Practical work did. “I didn’t go to school at all at 15, 16 really,” he said. “I was mostly in workshops, helping out, doing what I could.”

That route, built on exposure rather than qualifications, is arguably the most important step in his pathway because it shows how people from ordinary motorsport families still find a way in: by being useful, learning quickly and saying yes.

His first proper motorsport job came at Prodrive in Banbury, where he started in stores before quickly forcing his way closer to the race team. That was possible because Prodrive, in his telling, demanded flexibility rather than narrow job descriptions. One day might be stores, another race support, the next a car build.

“Whatever had to happen happened,” he said. “One day I’d be at World Endurance, then you come back and you’d be at British GT the next day.”

It gave him a grounding in logistics, spares, race preparation and the simple need to get on with the job.

From there came the move that defined the next 10 years: Mercedes. Fox joined just before Formula 1’s hybrid era, initially in parts co-ordination and build logistics. He walked into a team on the brink of a new rules cycle and found himself under immediate pressure.

“If this hybrid engine doesn’t get on the dyno this week, you won’t make the second week,” he recalled being told.

From the outside, Mercedes’ dominance looked polished and inevitable. Fox remembers it differently.

“It wasn’t luck,” he said. “It was chaos.”

That chaos meant 70-hour weeks, all-night rebuilds and a level of collective effort that left a lasting mark on him. He eventually became race team spares co-ordinator and also worked in hydraulics while serving as front jackman in pitstops. The title mattered less than the mentality. In his view, Formula 1 only works when everyone is prepared to do what the moment demands.

That has shaped the way he now operates at Kingsbury Racing.

“I’ve always had a light at the end of the pitlane,” he said. “That green light goes, you’re going out, you’ve got no choice, you can’t miss that.”

So what is Kingsbury Racing? Based at Bicester Motion in Oxfordshire, it is a historic motorsport preparation, restoration and engineering firm with in-house machining and manufacturing capability. It is best known for vintage Bentleys, but its work stretches further into other classic competition cars, race support, event preparation and collection management.

The company has a team of eight, including Fox and founder Ewen Getley, with two in the machine shop and three in the workshop. Its core remains vintage Bentley restoration and engineering, but the workshop now has a broader historic flavour. Alongside the Bentleys sit an ex-Schnitzer BMW E30 M3, an Alfa Romeo 8C, an MGB race car, Lotus Cortinas and a Mazda MX-5 training car. Kingsbury’s work now spans pre-war machinery, post-war racers and more modern historic competition cars in one shop.

Fox’s move to Kingsbury Racing was informal. Through his ice hockey circle he got to know people around the business, then spent time at Bicester and gradually got drawn in by Getley. He arrived, by his own account, to find skill and knowledge but not enough structure. That became his challenge.

He now describes himself as operations manager in practice, even if the role stretches beyond a normal workshop brief. He spends only around a quarter of his time on the tools, mostly on finishing jobs, road and track testing, tuning and the final quality-control tasks that he wants to see with his own eyes before a car leaves. The rest is spent organising work, managing customers and trying to make sure deadlines are real deadlines.

That is where Formula 1 still shows. Fox cannot tolerate a culture of simply delivering late because the world of top-level racing taught him that missing the moment is failure. He talks less about maximising invoices than about protecting quality.

Kingsbury Racing’s own line, he says, is that it would rather have a difficult conversation about the price than the quality of the result.

In practical terms, that means restoring and preparing cars as they should be, whether that is a blower Bentley or a race-prepared MGB. It also means supporting clients through the whole process: preparation, event logistics, track support and, where needed, coaching and guidance. Oh yes Fox, 35, is also an accomplished racer and can be seen steering anything from Edwardian race cars to the Kingsbury-owned ex-Schnitzer BMW E30 M3 – one of the most storied (and loudest!) M3 race cars in existence. At the recent 83rd Members’ Meeting, Fox scored a podium in a 1913 Peugeot Indianapolis.

Readers are most likely to see Kingsbury Racing cars at Goodwood, Bentley Drivers Club and Vintage Sports Car Club meetings, at Motor Racing Legends events and at headline historic fixtures such as Le Mans Classic.

For all the Formula 1 pedigree, Fox is not interested in nostalgia. What matters to him is the next job, the next event and the next standard to hit. His pathway has run from family workshops to Prodrive, from Mercedes pitlane pressure to a historic engineering business in Bicester.

But the common thread is simple enough: get in, work hard, learn fast and deliver. That, more than any job title, explains how he got to Kingsbury Racing.