Engineered in Portugal to be raced, repaired, and raced again.

Vantera was founded in 2013 in Marinha Grande, the Portuguese town that has tooled and moulded parts for the European car industry since the 1940s.

Rui Salgado had spent eleven years there building composite structures to other people's drawings — monocoques, crash structures, floors — and watching them come back after races, broken in ways the drawings had never anticipated.

The people who build a chassis should be the people who draw it.

In 2014 he was joined by Inês Meireles, a race engineer who had spent six seasons running customer GT cars across European endurance events. She brought the second conviction. In customer racing the car that wins is not the fastest over one lap. It is the one the team can fix — the one whose gearbox comes out in the dark, in the rain, inside a pit window.

Those two ideas are the entire company. Vantera tools and cures its own composite structures in Marinha Grande, ninety minutes from the Autódromo do Estoril, and designs every part likely to be damaged so it can be replaced rather than repaired.

The name

It comes from avante, the order given aboard Portuguese ships to press on.

What it means for the cars

The GT3 is a series of sixty road cars, built so the race car can be homologated. The GT4 is in continuous production and its competition version keeps the production gearbox. Where a part is shared between a road car and a race car, it carries the same number in both catalogues.

Forty-one people work here. Twenty-six of them are in the composites shop.