The History Behind JCO Automotive

James (Jay) has always had a passion for cars and motorbikes.  He has always had a lifetime of love and enthusiasm for anything with power and wheels starting from a young age of 4/5 where he had a classic 1960s Mini to play around with.

As a kid growing up next door to a classic workshop sparked his interest and he was often found helping out at the workshop or race track which involved cleaning,  inspecting,  preparing,  and build of the cars during the weekends, and holidays while still at school.

The first taste for international travel was when he got to go to Hong Kong, Macau aged 16 to do some historic Grand Prix races as well as going to circuits in the U.K and Europe doing such events like the Le mans classic.

While in this place of work he got to learn the very basics of everything from cleaning and examining the car to full rebuilds of the car.

He was lucky to work on a huge amount of amazing cars such as Ferrari 250 GTO, Ferrari Lm, Ferrari 275GTB Type 4, Ferrari Dino, Ferrari 250 SWB, Jaguar C , D and E Type , Lola T70 and numerous Group C Cars such as Ecurie Ecosse, Le Mans winning XJR – 12’s to name a few.

Attention to detail, precision and pride in his work are all massive attributes to Jays past and current success . His respect within the trade was becoming increasingly obvious.

Jay thought long and hard and decided to leave the historic era behind him as he has always wanted to follow his childhood dream of working in F1,  so he set out a path and hit his goal at the age of 20 when he got a call while testing in Barcelona with a Formula Renault and asked if he wanted a role on the test team at Force India F1 Team and that became the start of his F1 career.

The subsequent ban of F1 testing in 2008 reunited Jay with his past, that being classic cars in which he was lucky enough to fall into another classic car role where he looked after and built some cars that are similar to the cars stated above.

While in this role Jay was lucky to do the famous event called the Mille Miglia which is a motorsport endurance race based in Italy with a Ecurie Ecosse D-type followed by a train race that was Influenced by the trans-European train races of the ’20s and ’30 which Started from Victoria train station London and finishing roughly 29hours later in Venice.

After all this Jay got a call from Renault F1 Team regarding a job on the Demo/show car team which after 6 months led him to a full time race team position where he remained till early 2020 where altogether he did a 10 year stint in F1 travelling around the world.

Early 2020 Jay decided to get out of F1 as he felt he wanted a new and exciting challenge.  He decided to take a role for Aston Martin on the Aston Martin Valkyrie project designed by Adrian Newey who is the chief technical officer of the Red Bull Racing Formula One team.

Along the side of that he also helped his good friend Frazer Deane look after and run the Brawn F1 car for Ross Brawn at Goodwood.

Jay has been very lucky to have done some amazing events in his life so far and seen and done some amazing things.

For many years Jay has wanted to setup on his own and work for himself so he decided to put his knowledge and efforts into his new and exciting brand.

And that is how   JCO Automotive  was born!