AUTOSPORT HISTORICS
18 25 JULY 2019 AUTOSPORT HISTORICSNeither Patrick Blakeney-Edwards nor
Martin Hunt were early adopters of
historic racing, but the Cobra duo now
make for a formidable driver pairing
BY GRAHAM KEILLOHP
A late bite
by the old-
timer bug
atrick Blakeney-Edwards’ route into historic
motorsport certainly wasn’t orthodox. “My
brother and I set up a rock band and I was
a drummer for about 10 years until my late
twenties,” he recalls. “I had huge amounts
of fun and played the main stage at Glastonbury a couple of
times. Then I literally woke up with a large hangover – I was
28 or 29 and thinking, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do now?’”
It left Blakeney-Edwards with one option. “My father was
a GP but had a passion for vintage cars and in particular Frazer
Nash,” he continues. “As a young child my father taught me
how to weld and how to mill and how to work on cars, so I’ve
been involved mechanically with cars forever. Then I got given
a lovely private education but failed all of that... the only thing
I could do was wield a spanner. I set up a small garage in Bristol
fixing mostly vintage Frazer Nashes.”
He had a subsequent stint with Dan Margulies, then he
and another mechanic started a car restoration company in
North London before Blakeney-Edwards went his own way:
“About 15 years ago I bought my first commercial unit in
Buntingford, and it’s all grown from there.”
Now, Blakeney Motorsport is one of the UK’s
leading historic race preparers and restorers,
with around 160 cars and 30 mechanics, plus
five engine builders and its own dyno.
“What sets us apart is the eclectic mix of what we
do,” says Blakeney-Edwards. Although the operation
has “a strong backbone in Frazer Nashes” and “a
very strong pre-war theme”, its vehicles range from
London to Brighton steam cars through to a 1970s
Group 2 Rover SD1 and a BMW ‘Batmobile’.
In between there are pre-war Maseratis and
Bugattis, a host of 1950s and 1960s Jaguars and Jaguar-
engined machines – C-types, D-types, E-types, Coopers
and Listers – as well as Cobras. On track, Blakeney-Edwards
says, they’re all “pretty successful”.Blakeney-
Edwards ranks
RAC TT win at
2018 Classic in
the 289 Cobra
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