DAMON JONES / Canepa Motorsports

b500 magazine

DAMON JONES

Canepa Motorsports

English-born Damon Jones is an experienced manufacturing operations professional with a celebrated history of working successfully at a senior level for numerous prestigious brands in the automotive industry. Not your typical shirt wearing engineer, Damon wears his personality on his sleeve, quite literally! This tattooed, bearded Porsche enthusiast is mad for mid century architecture and when you meet him you’ll quickly realise how keen an eye for detail he has. I was really excited when b500 magazine launched. A magazine which focuses on all my favourite things. I am really proud to now have my very own regular page in the magazine alongside some of my own friends and people I have the upmost respect for in their own respective fields of expertise. I look forward to sharing my work, some car projects and my experiences with you all going forwards.

I graduated from Birmingham University with a Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) honours degree in Manufacturing Engineering. On graduation I set out to explore the automotive world gaining experience and building knowledge in the industry I love.

Between 2001-2005 I worked as a graduate ‘Project Engineer’ working in the Process Planning Interior Trim Department for MG-Rover. I was eventually promoted to ‘Principal Engineer’ of this team. I moved to Aston Martin in 2005 to work as a ‘Senior Manufacturing Engineer’. At this time the company was producing just one model, the DB9. I was responsible for the introduction of all new, future vehicles through from virtual build into final assembly production and was part of the team responsible for launching the V12 Vantage and V8 Roadster amongst many others.

McLaren Automotive reached out to me in 2011. They had just completed their new factory (MPC) and had just started building their MP4-12C model. They were in the process of building a Manufacturing Engineering team which was required to deliver their future business plan. I left my friends and family behind in the Midlands and moved to London to take up this new exciting challenge as their ‘Operations Engineering Manager’. With support from my team we delivered an exciting portfolio of vehicles to the market place which included two of my favourite models to work on, the 675LT & P1.

An even bigger move was made in the summer of 2016, when I moved to Los Angeles, California and joined Singer Vehicle Design. As ‘Vice President of Operations’ I was responsible for managing and supervising all of the work associated with the vehicle restoration from the arrival of the customer’s 911 donor car to final shipment to it’s customer.

Today, I’m still in sunny California, but now working at Canepa Motorsport as their Director of Operations. Our team preserves, restores and tunes some of the world’s most important road and motorsport cars. It’s very exciting to be working on our Porsche 959SC upgrade programme. A car which I’ve been obsessed with since I was a boy. We are also North American representative for a car you might have heard a little bit about recently in the news, the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 supercar….