A long time ago, I visited the folks at KTR European Motorsport in Ayer, Massachusetts. They have a great shop 40 minutes due west of Boston, and have made their name providing racing services for weekend warriors at road race circuits around the country. While their shop is fairly sizable, they have a lot of clients and not a whole lot of space to store cars. That’s how they came up with a unique means of storing some of the smaller cars.
You may recognize KTR European Motorsport as the shop founded by John Geils, lead guitarist for his namesake J. Geils Band. In the mid- to late-1970s, there was no hotter band in Boston than J. Geils. By 1976, the band’s Blow Your Face Out live album was in constant rotation on rock radio stations across the country. Geils was a European car and motorcycle fanatic and after the band dissolved, he launched a shop in the affluent suburb of Carlisle, Massachusetts.
In 1996, he sold the business, but is still involved in its operation. Today, KTR provides car prep and track support to vintage racing competitors at events from one end of the country to the other.
The shop has a main, street level where most of the work is happening, but also provides storage facilities on the second floor. The second story mostly consists of motorcycle storage, largely because there’s no access to the second story, other than the stairs, or an open door that looks down onto the first level.
In order to get smaller cars — like the Porsche 356 — up on the second story, the shop uses a forklift, with a custom cradle for the car. It’s as delicate an operation as it looks, mostly because the forks are extended about as high as they’ll go. Most of the weight of a 356 is at the rear, so there’s not a lot at the tip of the forks, but it still take a delicate hand on the tiller to get the car down from its highest level. Here’s the sequence showing how the car comes down:
…and it’s off to the races!
