Part of the UK's renowned high-performance engineering sector, Xtrac will attend a Royal reception later in the year. Her Majesty, The Queen, personally approves the winners announced by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). James Puxley, the Lord-Lieutenant of the Royal County of Berkshire, will present the award, which will also be later in the year, at the company's newly expanded design and manufacturing headquarters at Thatcham in West Berkshire.
Xtrac has put intense research and development effort into its energy-efficient hybrid & electric vehicle transmission systems and more recently has further ramped up these efforts.
"Xtrac was one of the early leaders in the inception of low carbon vehicle technologies," says Setter. "We first presented our ideas to policymakers at the Palace of Westminster in 2008 in response to the increasing interest in electric vehicles."
Initially, Xtrac worked with a consortium of automotive companies supported by Innovate UK to help develop new, highly efficient, propulsion and driveline systems.
"We then realized that we could lead the market using lightweight materials and patenting ground-breaking gearbox designs that could be used by carmakers globally," says Setter, who represents the Motorsport Industry Association on the UK’s influential Automotive Council Technology Group, which is coordinating the development of new energy-saving and CO2 reducing technologies.
As well as supplying motorsport teams, Xtrac today also provides many different types of automotive clients with new technologies and a skill base that can adapt quickly to shifts in market conditions and regulatory changes, including requirements for environmentally-friendly road cars.
While global motorsport takes a temporary pause, Xtrac will defer its celebrations and instead has joined the UK motorsport industry's efforts to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, by repurposing parts of its factory and staff to rapidly manufacture medical ventilator components for the Ventilator Challenge UK initiative.