'I found Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel's F1 car parts in a UK barn'
At a small farm a short drive from Northampton lives a treasure trove of Formula 1 parts ready for a new life.
On approach, there are no clues about what can be found at the end of the narrow country road leading up to the front gate. Surrounded by countryside and with the faint hum of the M1 in the distance, it could be your average British farm.
But it isn't. Inside these barns lies a mountain of F1 parts from seasons gone by, no longer of any use to the teams and headed for landfill unless someone can figure out a way to give them a purpose once again. That's where Memento Exclusives comes in. The company, founded and run by former F1 mechanic and engineer Barry Gough, has worked for almost two decades to cut down the enormous amount of waste produced by a sport which has scarcely been known for frugality.
"When I worked in F1, a long time ago, there was so much waste," he told . "In those days as well, 19 years ago, we used to have 10 chassis at a race whereas now you've only got two. So there was definitely a lot more waste in the olden days than there is now.
"But there is still a lot more we can do. The carbon brakes – as soon as they've reached their life, they used to go to the test team but now they don't. There's a lot of consumable stuff that we get: brakes, planks, gear ratios, all that stuff from most teams.
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"When I worked in Formula 1, even the team kit used to get burned or shredded at the end of the season. It's criminal, isn't it? Why would you do that? Wheel rims used to go to landfill. So much waste but, when you worked in it, you didn't see it as waste. It was just, 'I'm not using that anymore', so it goes and you get a new one.
Former F1 engineer Barry Gough is founder and chief executive of Memento Exclusives (Memento Exclusives)"I could see the potential then. When I was at British American Racing, a long time ago, I used to buy all the team clothes at the end of the season and then make a website and sell them online. That's how it started, really."
Those spare parts are housed in a barn on the property, known as the 'treasure trove'. There are boxes full of random, unmarked carbon fibre components. More obvious are the front wings and sidepods from Mercedes, McLaren, Aston Martin, even Renault and Force India F1 cars.
Some of the ways in which they are given a new purpose are obvious. Gears can become clocks or bookends, wheel rims are fitted with glass to become eye-catching centrepiece tables. Pretty much anything can be turned into a lamp.
Sidepods and front wings from the likes of Mercedes, Alpine and Haas fill this section of the barn (Daniel Moxon)And there are the more creative ways to use parts, one example being how an underfloor plank – a simple piece of wood with holes in and scrapes and scratched from where it has smashed repeatedly against the track – can be cut and shaped into a long skateboard, which is then labelled with the drivers who drove that year's car.
It all ties in with F1's efforts to become more sustainable, which is part of the reason that nine of the 10 teams have licensing deals with Memento, along with F1 itself. The other, as is being proven by the company, is that there is some serious money to be made with demand for memorabilia – particularly from American fans – so high.
"I started on my own and slowly grew it, but just before Covid there was just 15 of us and now there's 90," said Gough. "So in the last three-and-a-half years, we've really scaled up. Covid helped us, as a business, to understand where we wanted to go.
Memento Exclusive has a deal with nine of the 10 F1 teams to put their race-used car parts to good use (Daniel Moxon)"We concentrated on the digital side of the business and, obviously, Netflix helped the US market to just explode. The US market now accounts for about 40 per cent of our sales across the business. Netflix, getting more licences with the teams and the support we get from F1 is amazing."
It's not all about upcycling, either. Also on site is a full-scale operation building F1 show cars, using moulds and machines that could be found in a competing team's factory. From start to finish, it takes the team between four and five weeks to create a full-size replica F1 car which can then be shipped around the world for fan events.
Teams order them when they need, while there are also more innovative creations such as the front part of a Red Bull Racing chassis being used as a hi-tech simulator. Some teams even allow the company to build full F1 cars and sell them on to private buyers.
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Memento has a contract with Red Bull to create F1 simulators built into a car chassis (Memento Exclusives)And they're not all put together with freshly-forged pieces, either. Race-worn parts are also used in some builds, such as a replica of the Racing Point RP20 which won the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, adorned with the 'Thank You Checo' message placed on the car for the final race of that season to pay tribute to the departing Sergio Perez.
Gough's record sale was a Toleman F1 car driven by the late, great Ayrton Senna, which he sold for around half-a-million pounds to "someone in the paddock who collects cars". The next milestone he wants to hit is a seven-figure sale, along with an annual income a hundred times bigger than that.
"We need to get a licence agreement with all the F1 teams, we're missing one – it's red," he said. "The conversations were difficult at first. I knew what we wanted as a business, but most of the teams weren't interested. There are a lot of old-school mentalities in Formula 1 but that is changing, with a lot of different, younger people coming in including more American people who understand memorabilia.
Mirror Sport learns more about how old F1 car parts are turned into memorabilia for fans (Memento Exclusives)"We want to get them all on board and we want to rework our auction platform because it works, but we think it could work a lot better. We also want to sell more ex-racecars, running ones. And we want to be doing more re-engineered products, bringing them back to life and telling the story.
"One of the targets in the next few years is to sell a car for £1m+ and the other is to get the business to £100m turnover. That would be a good story in itself because it started from nothing.
"It's still not easy. Our contracts are different for each team – some teams won't give us race-worn suits, every team is different. I'd like to say it's easier, but it's not! But we're getting there. I want to make the teams more money and I want to make F1 more money."
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