RIP Hayden Burvill of WEVO
It’s been a sad February, as my good friend Hayden Burvill passed away. Hayden was not only the brains behind WEVO, but also a passionate man living a full and inspiring life. His name appears all over the blog and my experience of being partly (unknowingly) mentored by him is woven throughout the last 18 years of my life. I will miss him. Let’s have a look back on some of his and our history. There is a memory board for Hayden Burvill here.
Hayden grew up karting, and started autocrossing in Australia in 1981. Graduating with a BA in Industrial Design from Curtin University in Western Australia in 1985, Hayden Burvill began a career in race car engineering. In 1992, he started at the back end of the Formula 1 grid, running Roberto Moreno. He always laughed about this as the Andrea Moda team was running on less than a shoestring. There followed spells with Allard, Reynard and G Force, where Hayden had a hand in designing some rather successful Indy cars.
In 1995, he came to IMSA racing, on Spice Chevrolet and Courage V8s. The next ten years brought Indy, Rolex 24 and ALMS engineering engagements, and the start of WEVO. In 2005, he engineered the Ferrari 360 for JMB Racing. Later that year, Hayden went to Brumos, to engineer the famous number 59 DP Porsche for the 2006 and 2007 seasons. He continued race engineering well into the 2010s at Le Mans and in the US. He also engineered a production Carrera GT to the US closed-course speed record. He kept that one quiet – I found out by accident.
In the period from 1996 to 1999, everything changed as WEVO was born. The young Australian race engineer and design graduate, who had abandoned the glamour circus of F1 and arrived in America to work in GT racing, spotted an ad for a 1972 911 in search of a new home.
“I’d owned a 911 in the USA since 1996: a ’77 S. We’d been using it to develop the XT-915 ‘dog box’ transmission, our Gateshift kit, shift coupler and suspension parts. When we (we being H and wife Tracey) decided to expand our WEVO Porsche parts idea, I felt we had to go for an early car that would represent the business and our catalogue more effectively.
“Identifying 1972 as my ideal year, I targeted just those cars. Back then, I was working for Dick Simon’s Indy Car team and flying all over the USA. I carried $15,000 with me everywhere and scanned the classifieds wherever we stopped.
“I saw cars all across America: North Carolina, Texas and Oregon spring to mind. Eventually, I spotted an ad in our local San Francisco paper. It was a ‘72T in Gulf Orange, for sale across the bay in Oakland. The odometer had just clicked over and it sounded like a decent car, so I went to see it.
“The owner was a car guy but no Porsche expert: I knew more than him. The car had sports seats, a vintage Prototipo and beautiful patina. We agreed a deal and I bought it on the spot.
“High level motorsport looks glamorous, but the reality is all hard slog. Unwinding is important. I started autocrossing in Australia in 1981, so that’s my switch-off. We found the Porsche Club had a vibrant autocross scene here, so we began to bring the orange car along.”
WEVO the brand came from Windrush Evolution; Windrush being the racing boats designed and made by H and brother Brett in Australia. Hayden was not obsessed by branding – he would happily have used any short name he could buy the dot com for. But WEVO it was and what a brand it became within our small niche of the Porsche world. H’s MO was always to either significantly improve on what Porsche had designed – work that he always held in high esteem – or to leave it alone. I am proud to run WEVO parts on my own 911.
Where do I start with my love for this man. I first heard of Hayden (we always called him H) after Jamie (Lipman) had been to California with Steven H and ran out of gas in a 911 RS. Hayden came to rescue him. I seem to remember Jamie describing H as a sort of Aussie surf dude mechanic rock guitar guy in shorts with a wild sense of humour and telling me I had to meet him. That opportunity came a few months later when J and I took our first trip to CA. It was a travel disaster that saw us arrive at R Gruppe Treffen at bed time and exhausted from transit through Chicago on a Friday night. We had enough time to drop into WEVO on the way home and an enduring friendship was formed.
Hayden was careful with his time and attention, but when he gave it it was always given generously. His appetite for curry was legendary and we spent some great nights in the curry house around the corner from my place, which he enjoyed. I introduced him to Tuthills and Twinspark Racing and EB Motorsport and he had some adventures with all of them.
His run on the Peking to Paris Rally with Steven in Lola the Porsche 356 led to meeting former McLaren team boss Alastair Caldwell and their forming the most excellent friendship. H built a 912 for the two to rally from London to Cape Town, they also tried another event which took an early bath. They had a superb chemistry and it was fun to be around both of them, together or separately. I am blessed by my time with these two very enjoyable men and all the people I encountered with and through H. His intense curiosity meant he knew a lot of folks!
Over the years we collaborated on so many projects together, including WEVO Europe with Twinspark, which I was a partner in at the time, I blogged all of his endurance rally exploits on both the WEVO website and on my own blogs, built the Porsche 356 5-speed website with meticulous oversight from himself, covered thousands of miles in WEVO cars including Steven’s beautiful fleet that H built, enjoyed his and Alistair’s combined craziness, wrote god knows how many Porsche stories, did some Tuthill stuff including sequential gearbox work, had a bunch of EB Motorsport fun, compared notes on life events and WEVO deals and just enjoyed our man-to-man dialogue. I also spent our time together trying to buy his prototype brakes for my car, but he wouldn’t have it at any price!
H was also great with youngsters; my kids loved him and still remember his energy. I remember Arjen B’s son Derek doing time with H and having a ball. Below is a pic of a dinner on the beach at Zandvoort with Mark, James and Jayne from EB and the six of us had a good night. I had a few nights on the whiskey with H in San Ramon and that was a laugh – he loved craft whiskey and dreamed of making his own. Tracey and H were huge F1 fans and we always had good fun with that.
It was so sad when I heard that H had a health issue, right when it seemed that life had awarded him an exciting new chapter. I reached out a few times but did not hear back – I figured he was taking some time to absorb it. I was mid-divorce and running a challenging domestic environment with kids keen to push the boundaries, and my own parents died around the same time, but I would occasionally see an instagram like or similar from him. And then my divorce was done and I was planning a CA trip and Fishcop (John F) emailed to say he was gone. I’m told that he was very brave all the way through his treatment and at the end went on his own terms with dignity.
For me, he remains an ever-present part of my daily experience. H had an immense work ethic, intelligence, high standards, joi de vivre (let’s say 95% of the time) and a warm willingness to give his attention to people he selected quite carefully. He was disarmingly honest – I had more than one critical review from H which I didn’t ask for, but always appreciated! Here’s an example (on Steven’s Aga Blue ’67 911S, which I wrote as a tour of the Bullitt car chase route in San Francisco:
“Great piece of work, beautiful combination of words and images that are obviously close to my heart for many, many reasons. I love how the vintage vibe of the subjects, both car and your film recollections manage to veneer over the modern cityscape and make it all revert to 1970, its a combination of however Jamie processed those images and the continual return to the past in the dialogue. Absolutely excellent! Constructive criticism, because I know not everyone would bother to give you some. The evidence that the piece is well researched could be more transparent. There are times when it jumps directly from one collected fact to the next – from a different source – and your writing style does not fully disguise that. As a result it goes from being a John Glynn piece to a piece of John Glynn’s homework and back again. I know you are proud of this and rightly so, so take my CC as a boost, not a slap.“
I cannot express how much joy I absorbed from our friendship over the years. A quote he once shared, which to me encapsulates his attitude perfectly: “Absolutely nothing less gratifying than praise from an incompetent, and ordinary work being overrated by those with low standards”. That still makes me laugh; he hated shit work and fake people.
So long H, you beauty. On the one hand, I will and do miss you. On the other, you are not far away mate. Forever at the table when the lime pickle arrives, or by the fire when the whiskey is poured.
Featured image and 356 tracking shot by James Lipman© – The rest are by me or Hayden or Jamie!
