Priceless Restorations: Northumberland Engineering Keeps Vintage Cars in Top Shape

In his business, Tony Dutton often tells his clients that he doesn’t work for them. He works for their cars.

On Friday morning, October 27, that included over a dozen vintage automobiles inside his two workshops at Northumberland Engineering Inc. — pairs of Aston Martins, Jaguars and Mercedes, a Mini Cooper and Lotus Seven, a Lamborghini Espada, Fiat 500, Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, and more.

And none was built after 1972.

“It’s awful, it’s crowded, you can’t swing a cat sometimes,” Dutton said in his trademark British accent. “The big problem at the end of the day is getting them all squeezed away.”

Judging from the way he lights up while talking about cars — and his four-plus decades in the industry — the 73-year-old wouldn’t have it any other way. Even with the inevitable shift toward electric vehicles, Dutton knows his company will change and, even in his 43 years of business, he said he welcomes it.

“I think it’d be a mistake to continue to run these cars down the road and let them pollute,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy driving internal combustion engine cars and the sights and the smells and everything, but you’ve got to look toward the future.”

The company’s origin story begins during the early 1930s in northeast England, where Dutton’s grandfather founded Northumberland Engineering and his brother, Chris, still works on cars. But instead of immediately entering the family business, he chose a tangential path.

“I got the racing bug when I was at engineering college, working nights for a friend of mine who drove a race car,” Dutton said. “All my racing experiences are not behind the wheel because that’s dangerous — and you can’t bank the money if you’re dead.”

Dutton spent nearly 20 years in the United Kingdom vintage motor racing scene, learning how to keep the cars running, when an opportunity presented itself. One of his friends in New York called him up and said a man named James McAllister — one of the owners of McAllister Towing — needed an expert to look after his race cars and help run his Ferrari dealership in East Setauket.

“It was 2 o’clock in the morning, so I said, ‘Murray, I think you should go back to the bar and have another drink. If not, send me a ticket and some money,’” Dutton recalled. “Two days later, a Federal Express envelope arrived — ticket, money. So I thought, ‘Well, there’s nothing to lose,’ and I agreed to go over for three weeks.”

​Three weeks turned into three years and, in 1981, Dutton decided it was time to work for himself. He opened up his own shop in East Hampton — “after scraping all the rubbish off the walls and stunning everybody by painting the floor light gray,” he said — and focused on the support and preparation of vintage racing cars throughout the United States and Canada.

In just two years, the business outgrew the space and moved to its present-day location on Mariner Drive in Southampton, taking on more staff and a larger shop to house the firm’s growing projects, which have pivoted more toward vintage car restoration — some that are daily drivers, while others only grace the roadways on sunny summer afternoons.

“You can look at my job in two ways,” Dutton said. “You can say, ‘It’s toys for rich boys,’ or you can say, ‘We’re preserving automobile history,’ and both are quite true. But it’s difficult sometimes to convince people that if you’re gonna do this, you’ve got to do it properly.”

Outside of tremendous experience, working on cars that can date back to the 1920s takes patience, Dutton said — which his coworker and 36-year-old son, John, has in spades, he said, as does his small team of full-time employees and a couple of semi-retired part-timers who “can’t kick the habit and keep turning up.”

Any given job can range from 30 hours to several hundred, especially if it’s a major restoration, Dutton said. Most of the time, there are no books and there is no manual. Sometimes, the team works on cars that only had three or four produced.

In the case of restoring a circa-1930s Horch — one of the predecessors of Audi — there were only a few drawings to work from, Dutton said, and a bunch of car parts.

“Although a lot of the body was all wrong on it, the chassis and the suspension and the engine were correct,” he said. “But we didn’t know what the original body had looked like.”

Over the course of a year and a half, the team built a wooden framework and aluminum panels that comprised the new body: a long, graceful car with teardrop fenders, immaculate detailing and instruments from the period that belonged to a different model.

“It was very satisfying because, in a way, you got to go inside the heads of the people who built those cars back in the 1930s and look at the drawing and say, ‘Well, they did this on the outside, how would they design the interior trim? What would the door handles have looked like?’” Dutton said. “I’m very much into team efforts on cars. I look upon everybody who works for me as special. We try and do everything as a team.”

It was the teamwork from his racing days that Dutton particularly loved and he has carried that into his restoration practice. For many years, he worked as vehicle curator and organizer for Louis Vuitton at the Annual Classic at Rockefeller Center. He has supported clients in long- and short-distance racing events, including Louis Vuitton during the 1998 China Run, Alain de Cadenet at Le Mans, and private client forays to Monaco Grand Prix, Mille Miglia and Goodwood Festival of Speed.

This past summer, one of the prewar vehicles that Dutton maintains — a 1928 Talbot — won First in Class at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance in Monterey, California.

“Poor old Richard, who owned the car, couldn’t believe that he actually won it,” Dutton recalled with a laugh. “I have this vision of him walking off into the night, he was clutching his big silver trophy to his chest, with sort of glazed eyes.”

Even as the prized automobile nears 100 years old, it is not fragile — which is precisely the point, said Dutton, who drove the car over to the shop on Friday afternoon.

“This is what we’re more into these days, we’re more into people who like to drive their cars,” he said. “We do restore cars, but we’re not into producing what’s known in the trade as ‘trailer queens’ — cars that are so overly restored that people get really annoyed if somebody suggests that they drive them because they’d get dirty.”

In England, most classic car insurance policies employ mileage limits, Dutton explained, unless the original engine and gear box are swapped out for a custom-made electric unit — a service that he expects will become more popular when similar rules are eventually implemented in the United States.

“If it’s happened there, despite people moaning over here about their rights and everything, I think it’s gonna open up here at some point — it’s got to,” he said. “So we’re gonna see a change in our business in that area, but the cars are still gonna look the same and hopefully perform the same.”

At the end of any given work day, the final task is a game of vintage car Tetris — squeezing each priceless car back into the two workshops. Dutton savors the moment that they each drive away, back onto the roads where they belong, and treasures the notes he receives from owners who thank him for a job well done, he said.

But just as meaningful are the vintage car owners who are less well heeled, he said, and call him for his expertise — which he readily gives.

“If they take something off that’s a bit complicated, they’ll bring it along to us and we will fix it and give it back to them, and they’ll fit it themselves and that way, they get a lot of fun out of saying, ‘I maintain my own car,’” he said. “We’re pleased that we’ve helped them along in that.”