The history of Downton Engineering started in 1947 when Daniel and Bunty Richmond took over a small garage in Downton, Wiltshire.
Although they were always known as Mr & Mrs Richmond it is though that they were never actually married.
The garage originally specialised in the more exotic end of the market including Allard, Bentley, Buggatti, Lagonda & so on and soon had a reputation for being able to repair and tune the engines for whatever came their way, and they also serviced the more run of the mill cars for the local residents.
It was around 1957 that a local customer asked to have their Morris Minor fitted with a tuning kit from another company, however Daniel was so dissapointed with the end result that managed to change the car into something that was not really nice to drive and told the owner that he could do far better with something produced in house and this began a start into producing tuning kits for a whole range of family type cars including Austin A35's & A40's, Sprite's, Morris Minor's, Sunbeams, Triumphs etc. The decision to specialise in BMC cars seems to have occured around the time the Mini Cooper was launched in 1961 and after tuning the car and increasing the engine capacity article's appeared in several magazines of the time but the one that appeared in the December issue of Autocar was the one that drew most attention as they found the car to reach 103 mph and had a 0-60 of 9.6 seconds and called the article Mini-Ton-Bomb, the journalist who had tested the car apparently contacted Alec Issigonis with the car's performance who then asked to see the car. Within a short period of time Daniel Richmond was offered a position as a technical consultant to BMC. His first work for them was the design of the 12G295 cylinder head.