‘Our Visit’ is a new monthly series where we pay visits to Porsche specialists around the country and get to know them and their work on a more personal level.

This month, we visited the guys over at Wrightune Porsche, where we met Chris, the now owner.

Based in Oxfordshire, you can visit their website here.

You can also get in contact with Anthony and the trade team by either calling +44 (0) 208 900 0 900 or emailing trade@design911.com.

Tell us about Wrightune and your work

Chris: We’re a Porsche specialist, service and repair, modern and classic Porsche, as well as doing restoration and engine rebuilding here.

Thanks for coming down today guys, Design911 always provides us with excellent service.

The company started 20 years ago, my dad started it – he’s still here, doing it part-time now. He’s semi-retired, but it’s good to have that old knowledge.

Predominantly started off doing mainly race cars, race clients and engines, and then moved more into road, and we do a lot more road now, road work as in servicing and repair, general repairs, and we also do a lot of restoration work on the earlier air-cooled cars – predominantly engine work, but we can do the whole car. We do a lot of engines and gearboxes.

As I said, Design911 always supplies us with Porsche parts, it’s of the highest quality and also the service is excellent, it’s really fast. Next day.

My dad had a career. Started off in the 70s. He built the engines for the 1975 Mirage GR 8 and that was when he was 23. So it’s pretty good. Pretty good. That’s an understatement, slightly, but we are Porsche people and we’re pretty calm.

The last time he was employed he was working with Gforce Motorsport, working on some of the greats like the GT1, the GT2, the GT3s, the 935s, all those monsters. And then he wanted it to go on his own and he felt that Porsche was the and obviously had worked with other things before, like Ferrari, Lamborghini, all higher mark, but he decided that Porsche was the best engineering product. So it’s a no-brainer to do Porsche.

I came in about eleven years ago and then I started running the company about five years ago.

Joe has been with us since he was about 17 or 18. He’s 34 now, so he’s learned everything from my dad and he’s very, very skilled.

Mike’s joined us more recently and again he’s come from the general sector, but his work ethic is excellent and he’s learning at rapid rates, but also is very good with diesel stuff – so like Cayenne and Macan and stuff – we brought another element to the business so we can see more round and do anything Porsche.

So yeah, just showing it’s a bit cramped down here. There’s a lot of stuff being moved down here, but we’ve got a lot of engines here stripped. You can see the condition of the engine when it’s stripped. This now needs cleaning and checking, but I’m sure a lot of the parts will be out. Torrents will need machining and maybe replacement.

Again, that’s something that Design911 helps us with. For example, like the supplied Mahle barrels and pistons here and that’s OE, that’s what you’d buy from Porsche. But they source that directly.

That’s an example of internal components. And now this is the finished product. It’s not quite finished. Obviously, it needs an inlet system and exhaust system, but it’s the long block – and this is what we do. And obviously, everything inside mechanically will be checked or new, which will be supplied by you guys, but that’s a lot of things we do aesthetically as well – so it looks as good as the mechanical work on the inside, so it’s reflecting that. and also when you open your engine bay, I think you want to look nice when you’ve had an engine rebuild.

So we get all the parts, plated covers, vapour, blasted or powder coated, whatever the customer wants, or whether it wants to be original or if it’s a special, you have options. Yeah, clean the crankcases get them ultrasonically cleaned.

If things have been through there before, like for example, if the engine has been built and sealed up with silicon sealer, which you should never do because it breaks off and gets stuck in oil ways etc, stuff like that, and then that’s going to cause all starvation stuff. You don’t want that.

You’ve got to clean out that. So sometimes you have to degunk like this. And there’s bunk in the back end and clean it all through. Sometimes replacing pistons and squirters. We can check them, and a lot of these parts are all original.

90% of it is original. All these colours. A lot of people think we’re just bolting on new parts, but what we’re trying to do is restore and protect all the original bits.

So this is sort of like one of the specialist areas of our company is engine building, rebuilding and modification. Happy Christmas.

I’m just going to talk about some of the cars that we’re working on at the moment. This is a 1971, I believe, 911 T and it’s coming to us – it’s been bought – it’s in seemingly good condition, but it’s running quite badly. Aesthetically, the engine looked really nice, but mechanically it wasn’t. So it’s come out.

We’re rebuilding the engine and you guys Design911 are supplying all the parts of the engine.

It will be also going to the body shop because although the paint looks nice, it is starting to rust, is starting to come through. So that needs to be investigated further. So I’ll go to one of our partner body shops.

This 944 came in with no brakes, basically. the brake fluid looked like it never been changed.

It was black and the calipers were seized at the front. So overhauled them. They’re going to be going back on. And all the brake lines, some brake lines and bits. This Cayenne came in rough running and needed an MOT.

One of the injectors was leaking. One of the injectors was not operating correctly. So we replaced them. That sorted out the running problems and the ending check light just changed the rear control unit to sort out the fog lights, which wouldn’t work, and that was because the drains at the rear got blocked and we got water ingress in the car, wrecked the control module.

This 987 Gen 2, had running bolts, had a high-pressure fuel pump fitted and it’s also going to have all the gearbox oils, changed PDK and the other oil. So that’s that really.

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Special thanks to Chris and the Wrightune team for allowing this interview to happen.

You can find Wrightune by visiting their website, wrightune.co.uk.