• O u r B u s i n e s s
If you have an English car or are contemplating buying one, we can help you to enjoy owning and driving it. Our little company grew out of our hobby, our traditions in the English car industry and our desire to maintain enthusiasm for traditional English sports cars and modern saloons alike. Situated at Exit 10a on the Durham Freeway (Rte 147) in North Carolina. We are easy to reach from any direction and we always welcome visitors. We are open from 8:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Thursday and Friday 8:00am to 3:00pm.
Our shop is always full of a wonderful collection of customer cars: from Mini's to Bentley's, E Types to Healeys, and Land Rovers to XK8s.• O u r M i s s i o n
We make it possible for our customers to thoroughly enjoy owning their English cars by catering to their individual needs and offering quality restoration, maintenance, parts, repair, accessories, car sales, education and recreation.
We will be the natural choice and most respected car company for owners of English cars. To our customers, our shops and showrooms will be exciting places to visit. To us they will be models of cleanliness and efficiency that will add to our quality of life and enhance our skills. Our employees will be continually better rewarded and educated.
• O u r H i s t o r y
A Family Tradition. Flying Circus grew out of our longtime interest in restoring English cars and is continuation of a tradition that has been in our families in England since the late 19th century when Toby's great, great grandfather built coaches in Warwick. It survived despite grandpa Huckvale being bombed out of his Coventry garage in 1940 and continues today in uncle Gerald's workshop in Tewkesbury - and with us.
Our Hobby Takes On a Life of Its Own. In 1988, after years of our driveway being filled with partly restored cars, Simon and Toby started this company in our first premises in Brewer Lane in Carrboro - a 4 car lockup industrial building that we rented from our good friend Max Scroggs at A Better Wrench. We had few tools, few manuals, no lift, but a wealth of knowledge and passion for English cars and helping our customers to enjoy owning and driving theirs.
Within six months it was clear that bigger premises were essential and we moved out to a rather rundown but larger cinder block building out on Highway 54, west of Carrboro. We were flying high, took on our first employee and started having management meetings to help guide, what was by this time, a growing business.
We have a tiger by the tail. In 1991, unsure whether the business could continue to provide an increasing living for Simon and Toby from just English cars, we purchased from the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles a list of all English cars registered in the counties making up the Research Triangle. There were over 6,000! and we knew that much of our restoration work would continue to come from farther afield. That year we moved to Durham to be closer to the centre of our growing service and maintenance market and took on a 3 year lease for a 4,500 square foot shop on Muldee Street.
Before the first two years had passed we had outgrown the facility and needed more work space and better reception accommodations for our increasingly upscale customers. We now had a good idea what our ideal premises would be like and we also knew that our next move had better be our last. It had become clear that we were too big to pull up stakes and move the entire business every two or three years. We needed a headquarters location even though our business plan called for our buying some satellite businesses (A paint and body shop, a machine shop) in the future.
Incredible Luck. The superbly efficient, ideally located building on Pettigrew Street was vacant but it was 2 years too soon in our growth and more expensive than we dared to consider. However, after months of exploring options and negotiating, we landed a deal that enabled us to buy the property.
We moved in September 1994. To take advantage of the capacity and customer friendliness of the location and its appointments, we wrote to nearly every local owner of a late model Range Rover or Jaguar introducing them to our company and inviting them to visit our facility for scheduled maintenance, repairs, and oil changes. The response was overwhelming. We found and hired another skilled technician with experience in English cars and invested in a parts inventory, more lifts and developed our computer system to handle everything from parts buying to technical bulletins and tracking service history.
Still a Lot of Growing to Do. The business continues to grow and we continue to add new facets: A retail (new and used parts) store in 1994, accident repair in 1995, car sales in 1996. Throughout these startup years we have focused on providing exceptional quality of service to our customers and employing only the best people and resources. We have made personal sacrifices and studiously avoided accruing debt, believing that, if we could not do it well and with our available resources, we should not do it. Today, we own our equipment, our furniture, our tools, our inventory and the property.
The Future While our growth has been fuelled by the needs of our customers, it has been moderated by our ability to find experienced people and develop the systems that will assure a quality product. These continue to be significant factors for us. We expect to see continued growth in the servicing of later model Jaguars and Land Rovers as our good friends at Leith Jaguar and Land Rover Cary continue to bring in to the area more new models.
We will continue to do everything we can to promote the joy of owning an English car to youngsters who may one day contemplate an MGB and to grown ups who want to know how to select and enjoy a Jaguar.
