In the latest instalment of the Kincrome Mechanic Series, we cover the journey of Scott Robinson, who has worked for the likes of BMW, McLaren, Lamborghini and Lotus.
A passion for European vehicles set Robinson on the journey to becoming a mechanic, which began by attending motorsport events in his youth.
“As a kid I always loved cars I always used to go to the motor racing with my dad and remember going to Lakeside Park Raceway or Surfers Paradise Raceway and watching Tony Longhurst and Jim Richards race in the JPS BMWs, which was my favourite team to follow,” he said.
“When I left high school, I found an apprenticeship advertised in the paper with Annand and Thompson, which was the BMW dealer in Brisbane at the time back in the early 80s.
“I applied for that apprenticeship and was lucky enough to get it and went from there.”
He rose through the ranks, becoming a BMW Master Technician in 1988.
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“I was one of the first seven people in Australia to do that test and pass it,” Robinson explained.
“The qualification gave me a training passport, which meant that I could go and work anywhere in the world.”
Ultimately, it saw him move to the United Kingdom in 1991 where he also worked for BMW.
“I had the travel bug well and truly in my system, so I moved to the UK, where I managed to get a job at a brand new dealership in London and worked there for seven years as a Master Technician.”
From there, he secured a position with McLaren Cars in Woking, allowing him the opportunity to work on the McLaren F1 road cars and some extremely rare variants.
“I worked as a Master Technician on the F1 Road cars, which meant that I was looking after all the customer vehicles around the world servicing them and sorting out issues for customers at their homes, we were called Flying Doctors internally,” he said.
“A lot of cars of course came back to the factory for refurbishment for customers, changes of colours and changes to trim, so we were constantly working with customers and their cars create options that were never offered in production.
“I was also involved with the three McLaren F1-GT, the Longtail road cars – I built one of the three, and that went out to the Royal family of Brunei and delivered it to them.
“Later in my time there, I was involved with the SLR project development area with special tools, crash testing and repair sections of that car as well.”
After seven years at McLaren, he returned to Australia in 2004, where he transitioned into a different role in the industry.
“When I came back to Australia nobody could really offer me the technical role that I’d had with McLaren,” he said.
“BMW were keen to employ me but they just didn’t have a role that was open for me, so a local dealer offered me a sales role.
It was a nice experience honing my skills, learning how to sell to people the product – I was helped by the fact I was quite knowledgable and passionate about the product.
“After starting my career in sales with BMW, I went onto work with Lamborghini for 18 months, before I went onto manage a Lotus dealership for several years.
“In regards to sales, I found I’ve got to be a bit passionate and excited about the actual brand to want to sell them to people and that was an interesting process.”
Following his passion for restoring classic cars and race car preparation, Robinson founded Modern Classic Motorsport in 2020.
“I was doing a little bit of tinkering for friends with cars in their own garages for quite a while because I’d taken a year off and I was just doing my own thing, traveling and helping people with their restoration jobs and everybody kept saying you need to do this as a business, so I found a workshop and kicked things off in the middle of that year,” he detailed.
“The business grew through word of mouth, attending Cars and Coffee events, establishing a website, growing my presence on Instagram and Facebook and just building from there.
“I started to get the ball rolling and had some good work coming through, it is a real passion project of mine and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.”
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