Charles Dean, champion racer of vintage cars who created any spare parts he could not buy

Charles Dean: won the Williams Trophy at Castle Donnington on seven occasions between 2002 and 2010

Charles Dean, who has died of cancer aged 59, was an international amateur vintage racing champion whose early passion for motoring developed into a full-scale operation which he ran out of his home in Monmouthshire.

A director of the Bugatti Owners’ Club, Dean grew up surrounded by his father’s collection of classic cars. At university he drove a Shorrock Frogeye Sprite; on his father’s premature death during his first year he inherited a Bugatti T51, a Bugatti T59/50B, and a Ferrari Dino 206.

Alongside a career in the oil industry which took him to Aberdeen and Nigeria (he much preferred the latter), and later while running his own laser-engraving company, Fimark, Dean built the family fleet into a competition force. Identifying problems with the cars weekend by weekend, and fixing them in collaboration with the veteran Bugatti expert Cecil Mitchell, Dean went on to win the Williams Trophy at Castle Donnington on seven occasions between 2002 and 2010.

Dean also won the Monaco Historic Grand Prix, and when Laguna Seca in California hosted a Bugattis-only race in 2010 he finished first with three seconds to spare. Closer to home, his record at the Vintage Sports-Car Club’s annual Prescott Hill Climb at Gotherington in Gloucestershire was a point of pride.

Dean later turned his attention to restoration, searching for original parts all over the world and making anything that could not be found himself. When asked what it had been like growing up in a world where his playroom had been a garage full of oily bits of broken-up cars and grimy pieces of chassis, he observed, in a characteristically matter-of-fact way, that it was “no different from mucking out ponies”.

He spent much of his last decade restoring a tiny Type 72 10.5cc Bugatti bicycle engine, with little practical use, simply for the joy of it.

Dean with his bicycle

Charles Daniel Dean was born on May 19 1966 in the southern Marches, to Martin and Alison Dean, née Geddes. His mother was a granddaughter of the Conservative politician Sir Eric Geddes, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the end of the First World War and later served as minister for transport; his father’s forebears hailed from Cheshire, where they had made their fortune in sliced bread.

Charles’s early shyness was traced to chronic short-sightedness – although it did not stop him cutting down a magnificent and ancient wisteria on the front wall of the family home, by way of experimentation with a junior carpentry set. It presaged a predisposition for tinkering with things which lasted for the rest of his life.

After Elstree, Eton and a year in the Australian outback, he read mechanical engineering at Bristol. Spectacles, followed by surgery, helped Dean grow out of his early diffidence into a confident young man, charming and full of bombastic bonhomie.

Tall, thin and patrician in bearing, he professed himself “temperamentally unsuited to working for other people”; the self-assurance of his adult life sometimes occasioned mayhem.

At a Trinity May Ball in the 1980s, in full evening dress, he set off for the bar through a gap in the side of a tent, ignoring his companions’ protestations that it was in the opposite direction. Five minutes later he reappeared dripping wet and covered in weeds, having marched straight into the Cam.

A forensic curiosity about the components of things

Other escapades were more successful: Prague, where with friends he witnessed the 1989 Velvet Revolution at first hand; Iceland in the footsteps of WH Auden, in a cargo ship from Hull; across America in a lipstick-red convertible Mustang; through Europe on a Bugatti racing bicycle which he commissioned after finding some original drawings.

He once drove to St Moritz to become an honorary member of the Cambridge Cresta Run Club. One of his teammates, the son of a Conservative MP, wrote home with a potted summary of their performance: “We are having the most brilliant time hurtling down sheet ice only four inches above the ground at 65mph. It is quite frightening but very exhilarating… we all got rather drunk last night.”

Dean absorbed knowledge like a sponge, but claimed that most of what he knew came from listening to Radio 4 while driving. He had a forensic curiosity about the components of things – whether the perfect Bloody Mary or the ideal lime-and-sand formula with which to repair ancient chimneys. When he went to Elizabeth Hurley’s four-day Indian wedding to Arun Nayar in 2007 his bedtime reading, for which he eschewed the later-evening entertainments, was a history of Dunlop tyres. Elizabeth Hurley read the lesson at his funeral.

With his second wife, the journalist Olenka Hamilton

Dean was loyal to his friends, and, although he professed that he had none whom he had not known for at least 25 years, kindred spirits were added to his circle as they appeared. He refused to join any social-media platforms, much preferring human interaction and reading to anything to be found on the internet.

His hospitality was prodigious – whether at his London flat, at White’s, or at the mediaeval house he spent the last two decades restoring near Usk. He generally left the cooking to others: for all his racing trophies he was just as proud of his 2011 “Least Adventurous Diner of the Decade” at the Noor Jahan, just off the Old Brompton Road, where for 30 years he unfailingly ordered chicken tikka masala, plain rice and a pint of Cobra.

Charles Dean married first, in 2012, the garden designer Honor Holmes; they divorced a few years later. In 2018 he married the journalist Olenka Hamilton, a daughter of the 13th Lord Belhaven and Stenton, with whom he had two daughters and a son.

Charles Dean, born May 19 1966, died May 27 2025

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