Rockwall resident to pilot custom-built vintage car in world’s longest rally

GOING THE DISTANCE

(ROCKWALL, TX — May 3, 2016) Local man Tim Taylor is taking his passion for building and restoring vintage cars and putting it to the ultimate test, embarking on the world’s longest rally known as the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge from June 12 through July 17. Tim – owner of Red Car Restorations in Rockwall – and his team of auto craftsmen hand-built a 1915 and 1925 American LaFrance, which he and the owner of the vehicles, Steve Trafton of Whidbey Island, WA, will pilot for the month-long rally. The project took two years to complete, turning what were once two fire trucks into finely-tuned Speedsters measuring nine and a half feet tall and 20 feet long, with the tires measuring at 40 inches tall and the engine displacement at 900 cubic inches.

GoodLiving_Peking-to-Paris-endurance-rally_WEB — Tim Taylor next to the 1925 American LaFrance.

Tim found his calling in restoring exotic European cars as a young boy tinkering with cars in the backyard of his parents’ home, a hobby which he eventually turned into a business here in Rockwall.

“The cars that we do are not massed-produced like GM or Chevrolet or even Ferrari to this day does,” Tim said. “We build cars like they were built back in the ‘60s or in the early teens.”

Using modern technology and engineering techniques, Tim designs the all-aluminum bodies of the cars using an in-house 3D CAD program, and then later hand-shapes and welds the bodies together based off those designs.

“For the most part all of the cars that we build and restore are aluminum-bodied, and that’s sort of a lost art,” Tim said. “There’s few people that can repair and remake those.”

GoodLiving_Peking-to-Paris-endurance-rally_Thomassima-II_WEB — Thomassima II. Photo courtesy redcarrestorations.com.

Italian car restoration makes up the primary focus of Tim and his shop, with one of the more recent projects consisting of a completely restored 1967 Thomassima II for the Concorso Italiano car show at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance event in August last year. Tim said the car is one of the more famous cars they have restored, and was featured in the 2015 edition of the Concorso Italiano event magazine.

The million-dollar cars typically take two to three years to complete and are built to order right inside Tim’s shop in Rockwall. He said most of the cars he restores are for customers located in other parts of the country, and that the cars have a lot of financial and historical value to them, meaning the owners typically hope the cars will long outlive them and be passed down from generation to generation.

“There’s only a handful of guys throughout the country that still do things like this at this kind of level,” Tim said. “Our talent is restoring cars that there’s no part supply for. If there are missing parts we make them the way they were made back then, from the sheet metal work to some castings. It’s very expensive to do that, but that’s what’s needed to bring these vintage works of art back to life and preserve them for generations to come.”

Aside from restoring vintage cars, Tim has also delved into motor sport racing, having built a 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO which claimed the world record for land speed marks at Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats, topping 275 miles per hour. He also built engines for Qatari drag racer Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al Thani, helping the Dubai native win the 2007 NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Super Comp championships.

Compared to other types of racing, however, the Peking to Paris Rally is an entirely different animal.

The 6th Annual Peking to Paris Motor Challenge 2016 will see 120 vintage cars travel thousands of kilometers starting from the Great Wall outside Beijing on Sunday, June 12, and ending with a drive into Paris to cross the finish line in Place Vendome on Sunday, July 17. The route will wind through the most adventurous region of the Mongolia, crossing into Russia and on to the Republic of Belarus, with an exciting new route across Europe featuring closed-road mountain climbs in the Alps.

Unlike a speed race, the Peking to Paris is an endurance rally with a set goal time for each section of the course every day. Whoever finishes closest to that goal time wins the race for that day.

“We will not know what the course is until that morning of every day,” Tim said. “We won’t know exactly where we’re going. So the challenge is how you plan for that.”

Tim said that while participants will be catered well along the way, they are responsible for repairing their vehicles should they break down, a common occurrence in this race. To avoid break downs he plans to only average between 30-45 mph.

“If we don’t break we will do well,” Tim said. “We may not be the fastest every day or the slowest, but if we don’t have a day that we’re down we’ll make huge gains on everybody.”

And the prize for winning? A cup, a bottle of champagne and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“It’s a glory thing,” Tim said. “It’s like climbing Mt. Everest. There’s only a small group of people who have been able to complete this race in the five they’ve held since 1907.”

To see more of Tim’s work visit redcarrestorations.com and p4bynorwood.com. For more information about the 2016 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge visit peking2paris2016.no/.

By Austin Wells, Blue Ribbon News editor.

Your #1 source for positive hometown stories, entertainment and events.