Renzo Bellandi answers the workshop door with oil under his fingernails and a stub of pencil behind one ear, which is how I will always picture him now. He is seventy-three, and he is exactly where he has been for most of the last half-century: in a low brick building on the edge of a small town near Modena, surrounded by the disassembled internals of racing cars that were built before he had grey hair and are worth more now than the building they sit in.

He started as an apprentice in 1969, sweeping floors for a small constructor that built sports-racers for privateers, and he never left the trade. He has worked for factory teams and for gentleman drivers, prepared cars for the Targa Florio when it was still a road race that killed people, and now spends his days as a restorer and race engineer for the historic circuit. I went to talk to him about a life in motorsport. I stayed most of a day.

On the engines that taught him

I ask him which car taught him the most, expecting a famous name. He wipes his hands and thinks for a long time.

“The ones that taught me were the ones that broke,” he says. “Anybody can learn from a car that wins. You learn nothing. It went fast, good, bravo. The car that throws a rod at three in the morning, that is your teacher. I had an engine — a small V8, beautiful thing, sang like a soprano — and it kept failing the same big-end bearing. Everyone said bad luck. I said no. An engine does not have bad luck. An engine has a reason, and the reason is always something a man did or did not do.”

It took him a season to find it: an oil gallery that ran a fraction too lean at sustained high revs because of a casting tolerance nobody had questioned. “After that,” he says, “I never trusted a drawing again. I trust the metal. The drawing is what they hoped. The metal is what they made.”

On listening

He has a reputation, I tell him, for being able to diagnose an engine by ear. He waves it away, then immediately undermines himself by demonstrating. There is a four-cylinder running on a stand at the far end of the shop, and without looking up he says it is half a degree retarded on the ignition. His assistant checks. He is right.

“It is not magic,” he insists. “It is fifty years. An engine is talking the whole time. It tells you when the mixture is wrong, when a valve is tired, when the bearing is starting to go — there is a sound, a little hardness, days before it lets go. Today the young engineers, they look at the screen. The screen is good. The screen tells you the temperature, the pressure, all the numbers. But the screen tells you what already happened. The ear tells you what is about to happen. That is the difference, and it is everything.”

He is not anti-technology — he is quick to say modern data acquisition has saved engines his generation would have lost — but he mourns what it has done to the young trade. “A boy comes to me from a good university. Brilliant. He can model the airflow on a computer better than I can imagine it. But he has never had his hands inside a hot engine, never felt the slop in a worn bearing with his own fingers. He knows the theory of the thing and not the thing. You cannot engineer a car you have never touched.”

On the cars that mattered

I ask about the cars he is proudest of having kept alive. He lists them the way other men list children.

  • A 1967 sports-prototype with a flat-twelve that, he says, was “the most honest engine I ever knew — cruel, but honest. It never lied to you about what it wanted.”
  • An early-1970s Group 5 car whose handling was so vicious that two professional drivers refused it, until a setup change he still won't fully describe — “a secret is only a secret if you keep it” — made it tameable.
  • A road-racing Alfa that he rebuilt three times after three different owners crashed it, and which he speaks of with the weary love of a man who has buried and resurrected the same friend repeatedly.

“People think the famous cars are the hard ones,” he says. “No. The famous cars, the factories kept good records, you know what they did. The hard ones are the privateer specials. One man in a shed in 1971 built something clever and wrote nothing down. Now it comes to me and I have to read his mind across fifty years and a grave. That is the real work. You become a detective. You ask, what was this man trying to do? Why did he braze this here? And slowly he tells you, even though he is dead.”

On how the craft has changed

The historic-racing world he serves now did not exist when he started; the cars he restores were simply old racing cars then, cheap and unloved, many of them scrapped. “We threw them away,” he says, with real pain. “A winning car, two seasons old, obsolete — into the corner, strip the good parts, the rest is metal. If I had kept what passed through my hands in the seventies I would be a rich man and you would be interviewing me by my swimming pool.” He laughs, but not entirely.

The change he respects most is the rise of genuine craft-preservation: the workshops that can now make a panel or a casting indistinguishable from original. The change he distrusts is money. “When the cars became valuable, the lawyers came, and the authenticity arguments. Is this the chassis, or a chassis, or the third chassis they built around the first one's logbook? I do not enjoy those fights. A car is what it does on the track. If it runs the way the original ran, if a man can race it and feel what the first driver felt — that, for me, is authentic. The paperwork is for the auction house.”

On why he is still here

I ask the question you have to ask a man of seventy-three with oil under his nails: why not stop? He looks genuinely puzzled.

“And do what?” he says. “Every engine I open is a conversation with the man who built it. Some of them are my friends, dead now. Some I never met. But I am still talking to them, every day, with my hands. When I retire, the conversation stops. So I do not retire.”

He walks me to the door past a Le Mans car from the year I was born, its body off, its insides laid out on a bench with the order of a surgeon's tray. He pauses over it, the way he paused over everything, and tells me it will run at the historic meeting in the summer, that it will sound the way it sounded in period, and that a man will drive it not knowing how close it came to never running again. “He will never know,” Renzo says, almost happily. “That is the job. Nobody is supposed to know. They just hear the car, and the car sounds right, and they think it was always going to.”