Xtrac

Xtrac’s story starts in a lock-up behind a Chinese restaurant in Wokingham, where Mike Endean, a former Hewland engineer, began making gearboxes for rallycross cars in the early 1980s. His first gear-cutting equipment came secondhand from a nearby company called MEH that was closing down after one of its directors died, which was enough to let him start building components in small quantities for off-road motorsport.

In 1983, Endean and Chris Goddard, who’d been working on the electronics side, built the first Xtrac four-wheel-drive system for Norwegian rallycross driver Martin Schanche, who had the original idea for a hydraulic 4WD setup that could shift its front-to-rear ratio on the fly and put up the money to develop it. The name itself came about almost by accident, Endean jokingly told commentator Murray Walker his unnamed company was “Mr X’s Traction Company.” Walker shortened that to “Xtrac” on air, and the name stuck. Endean and his wife, Shirley, formally set up Xtrac Ltd on 15 June 1984.

Growth came from solving problems nobody else was solving. At the time, the main off-the-shelf supplier, Hewland, only sold gearboxes in small, medium, and large sizes, so teams spent hours welding and modifying parts just to make them fit. Xtrac went the other way, building bespoke units and even developing its own gear steel rather than relying on the decades-old EN36 alloy everyone else used, doubling gear life in the process. Peter Digby, one of the company’s earliest employees, became managing director and later president as the business expanded.

Xtrac built transmissions for three F1 teams in 2010 (Lotus, Virgin, and HRT) in just six months and has stayed deeply embedded in motorsport since, supplying IndyCar, NASCAR, Supercars, Formula E, most LMH, and all LMDh cars and becoming NASCAR’s sole gearbox and driveline supplier from the 2022 Next Gen Cup car onward. Beyond racing, Xtrac transmissions have found their way into road cars too, including the Pagani Huayra.

More recently, under CEO Adrian Moore and with backing from investment firm Inflexion, Xtrac has pushed hard into hybrid and electric transmission systems, growing that side of the business from 13% of revenue in 2017 to 40% by 2023. The company now employs close to 500 people, runs two outposts in the United States, and holds sustainability accreditations, including Science Based Targets approval and Living Wage Foundation status, a long way from a lock-up behind a restaurant, but still, at its core, a gearbox company that started by refusing to accept “small, medium, or large” as good enough.