IT’S TAKEN TWO DAYS OF HIKING around Daytona International Speedway, but I’ve finally found Larry Holt. As the man in charge of engineering and motorsport operations at Multimatic, Holt is keeping tabs on 12 cars built at the Canadian company’s factory near Toronto—two Ford GTs, two Mazda RT24-P DPi prototypes, the BAR1 LMP2 car, and seven Ford Mustang GT4s—so I figured he’d be easy to find. And even easier to spot, with his halo of frizzy white hair and muttonchops straight out of a Civil War portrait. In a motorsport world where just about everybody conforms to the same cosmetic conventions, he stands out like a stripper in a tent revival.

At 8:30 p.m. Saturday, about a quarter of the way through the Rolex 24, I get a text: “I’m at my AMG trailer.” His AMG trailer? Turns out that in addition to everything else, Multimatic also stocks, staffs, and operates the spare-parts trailer for the Mercedes-AMG customer-racing program. “We do a lot of projects for a lot of companies,” Holt says when I finally find him hiding out in the cab/office with Stephen Charsley, who oversees the Mazda program for Multimatic. “A lot of the stuff we do, we sign NDAs coming out the yin-yang.”

“We’re like the motorsports CIA,” Charsley adds. “We go in, we do it, we get out, nobody knows we were there.”

They share a laugh. “People in the industry know what we do,” Holt says. “People outside the industry don’t f***ing matter. They’re not going to give me any business.”

He snorts. “We were talking on the pit lane before the race, and we figured there are 22 cars here that we touched in some way—shocks or whole chassis or putting cars on our four-post shaker rigs. Somebody said, ‘That’s awesome!’ No, it’s not, because for sure some f***ing thing is going to go wrong with at least one of them.” He laughs again, sounding honestly amused. “I don’t want to be pessimistic, but somebody’s going to end up being pissed off at me.”

Nick Busato

Multimatic is a billion-dollar manufacturing leviathan that makes millions of parts found on production vehicles—Ford F-150 suspensions, Honda Civic bumper beams, Volkswagen Jetta twist-axle stampings, the list goes on and on. Holt’s group at Multimatic Engineering designs and engineers most of these components. He’s also responsible for building low-volume vehicles such as the Ford GT, the Aston Martin One-77, and the GT4-spec Mustang. On weekends, almost as a busman’s holiday, Holt runs Multimatic Motorsports, which is a major player in the racing world as both an entrant and a supplier. The team has earned a class win at Le Mans and numerous road-racing titles in North America. Meanwhile, the company’s spool-valve dampers have been the secret sauce in multiple championship-winning Formula 1 and Indy cars.

While Multimatic prefers to operate on the down low, Holt is a figure made for the spotlight. He’s unusually open, refreshingly candid, and disarmingly congenial. At 58, he combines the analytical mind of a trained engineer with the unadulterated language of a Joe Pesci mobster. “People who judge a book by a cover think, What’s up with that guy?” says John Doonan, who runs Mazda’s motorsport programs. “But the thing about Larry is that he tells it like it is. He’s also one of the most loyal and up-front individuals I’ve ever met. When he puts his arm around you and says, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ he really means it. There’s nobody else like him in motorsports.”

Holt willed Multimatic Motorsports into being, and the operation is very much a reflection of his combative spirit, passion for motorsport, and lust for technological advancement.

“He’s the most brilliant man I’ve ever met. Technically, he’s up there with Adrian Newey and Gordon Murray,” says Scott Maxwell, the first driver Holt hired, in 1992, and still the team’s lead ’shoe. “But that’s only part of his strength. He’s also charismatic, he’s a good listener, and he understands business.”

Holt himself describes his role with customary pungency. “Enzo Ferrari once said, ‘I’m not a technician or an engineer. I’m an agitator of men,’” he says, paraphrasing. “That’s what I am. I’m a f***ing agitator of men.”

Drew Gibson

THE MULTIMATIC TECHNICAL CENTRE IS nestled within an anonymous industrial park in Markham, Ontario. There is nothing visible from the street to identify the low, sprawling, red-brick buildings other than a pair of cubes bearing the Multimatic logo—a gloss on Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, with an idealized figure standing inside a toothed gear. It’s impossible to peer into most of the windows, and all the doors are locked. The small lobby is modestly decorated with race trophies and a display case of plaques commemorating company patents for not only automotive products but also ice skates. This is Canada, after all.

Holt starts his tour with the design offices, where engineers sit at cubicles filled with the requisite array of computer-aided-design workstations. But his enthusiasm builds as he heads to the noisy shop floor, where he proudly shows off equipment ranging from old-school Bridgeport mills to a five-axis laser cutter, paint booths to autoclaves for carbon-fiber production. “I run a business, and that becomes all-consuming,” he says. “But I don’t want to lose my skills, like TIG welding, and I’m really passionate about engineering. So I battle every day with the balance between running the company, being on the shop floor, and designing something.”

Holt is so blunt, politically incorrect, and stupendously profane that it’s hard to imagine him in a corporate boardroom. But he’s very much in his element roaming through the factory, greeting neatly dressed workers with rough good humor. “I’ve got 900 employees in engineering, and I know every one of them,” he says. When somebody congratulates him on recently being named the company’s chief technical officer, he jokes, “Oh, go f*** off.” Later, he good-naturedly tells a photographer, “Get a picture of Tom. I’ve never seen him working before!”

Like Holt, Multimatic is unique. No other operation offers such a combination of high- and low-volume production expertise along with world-class engineering and design services. The company dates to the 1950s, when Austrian immigrants Frank Stronach and Anton Czapka opened a small tool-and-die shop dubbed Multimatic in Toronto. They quickly realized the real money was in making parts, not tools. The route from Ontario to Detroit on Highway 401 was dotted with car-building plants and smaller vendors cranking out components, and Stronach and Czapka grabbed a piece of the action. Multimatic morphed into a publicly traded company renamed Magna International, which is now the largest automotive parts supplier in North America.

Anton’s son Peter, a brilliant engineer with ambitions of his own, felt constrained by Magna’s bureaucracy. So in 1984, the younger Czapka and Stronach carved out a new company using the old Multimatic name. (Peter Czapka later bought out Stronach and is now the sole owner.) At the time, the auto industry was moving to what’s known as the build-to-print paradigm. That is, carmakers continued to design and engineer components in-house, but they farmed out the actual production of parts to third-party suppliers. Czapka landed a contract to build hinges for Chrysler trucks and never looked back. Thousands of components go into the assembly of even the most unsophisticated subcompact car, and Multimatic knocked them out by the millions—door strikes, trunk hinges, impact beams, instrument-panel supports, rocker panels. But early on, Czapka concluded that build-to-print was a dead end, or in his case, a way station to a more profitable relationship with the original equipment manufacturers.

Wes Duenkel

“Peter was a clever guy,” Holt says, using one of his highest forms of praise. “He rapidly saw that he’d rather sell a product than essentially renting our equipment to make somebody else’s engineering design. His vision was to make his own parts, his own inventions, products that nobody else had. There are a lot of factors that make Canada less competitive with Mexico and the southern United States. Peter realized that we had to have a differentiator. And he decided early on that that had to be technology.”

In 1986, Multimatic was involved in a competition to design a jack that would be used in all Chrysler products. But the prototypes kept failing. So Czapka went through the back door to enlist the aid of a junior engineer at Magna, who specialized in the then-newfangled discipline of finite structural analysis—an outspoken, long-haired character named Larry Holt. Holt ran a series of computer models that correctly predicted where the prototypes would break. Czapka was so impressed, he offered Holt a job running a new unit, Multimatic Engineering.

Although the firm continues to do some build-to-print work, it’s now focused on making components created by Holt’s engineering arm. Automakers provide sets of specifications—pickup points, for instance, and price and weight targets—but Multimatic designs and manufactures them. The entire front suspension of the Ford F-150 comes out of a Multimatic plant, ready for installation. So do the control arms for light-duty General Motors trucks. The Jeep Wrangler’s so-called sport bar is created by a proprietary Multimatic process that involves blowing compressed air into superheated boron steel tubing. Even bigger profits are baked into pieces Multimatic dreamed up and prototyped on spec, then sold to the customer. Example: the patent-pending rear wing on the Ford GT road car, which deploys a Gurney flap when it rises, to enhance high-speed stability. Multimatic also invented the tailgate step on Ford pickups. Although Multimatic Motorsports functions as a standalone unit, it plays a critical role in attracting talent to the engineering group. “It’s very difficult to tell a young guy, ‘You’re going to design door hinges for Honda for the rest of your career,’” Holt says. “But I say, ‘I’m going to bring you in at a junior level, and for the first couple of years, you’re going to work in my mechanisms group, designing door hinges for Honda, and if you’re good at that, then potentially, you’re going to be designing Ford GT race cars. That’s your career path.’ And they line up around the block.”

Holt ticks off other reasons manufacturers typically cite to justify racing programs: that it drives technical innovation and teaches engineers to be more agile and creative. That it’s good for the brand and provides a point of personal contact with the gearheads who run the technical side of most carmakers.

“Those are the official reasons we went racing, and they’re all valid,” Holt says. “The unofficial reason is that I loved racing, and the only way I was going to get to go racing was to have my hobby inside my business. It gets in your blood. It’s like a f***ing drug.”

Drew Gibson

YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A MAN FROM his enthusiasms. Although Holt’s motor is always running close to redline, he gets particularly excited when he whips out his cellphone to show photos of F1 cars he shot at the Canadian Grand Prix when he was 12. In the shop, he makes a special detour to “the coolest thing in the building”—a six-degrees-of-freedom driving simulator controlled by so much software that it takes two hours to boot up. The sim is used for race-car setup and driver training. “But on Friday nights, we do the alcohol lap-time challenge,” he says. “Up to two beers, you’re quicker. And on the third beer, you crash.”

Holt was born in England to a father who raced BSA motorcycles. He moved to Canada at nine, and his father got a job managing a Ferrari dealership in Toronto. Holt started wrenching on a Lola T212 sports prototype when he was 14 and later raced motocross bikes and a vintage MGA. But there was no time for childish pursuits once he joined Multimatic.

“From 1988 to 1992, I was working 70 hours a week,” he says. “During that period of time, I stopped racing, didn’t even start my motorcycles. It was all I could do to run the business. We were doing great things, had huge success, got some really cool programs. We did exactly what Peter wanted us to do, which was develop some products and differentiate ourselves, and our growth was spectacular. But I really missed racing. So I said, ‘Okay, Peter, I’ve got to do some f***ing racing.’”

Jake Galstad / Getty Images

Czapka agreed to fund a small program. Holt prepped a Ford Taurus SHO for the Canadian Firehawk series for showroom stock cars and hired a supremely talented but chronically underfunded Canadian formula-car driver named Scott Maxwell. First race out, they spanked a competitive field at Mosport Park and went on to romp to the championship.

“I kept 7500 bucks of the 50 grand that we got, and I thought, This is f***ing great!” Holt says. “That didn’t happen every year. We had some years when Peter asked me, ‘What are we spending all this racing money on?’ And rightly so.”

Maxwell credits Holt for consistently having an answer to that question. “Larry’s always had to make a business case for the motorsports program. He isn’t given a blank check. He has to answer to the company. He’s got a vision, he sees the big picture, and he knows how to play the long game.”

Multimatic Motorsports has fielded teams in various road-racing series just about every year since, with the exception of 2007, when Holt was told to take his ball and go home so some other entrants could win a few trophies. The high point, Holt says, was the class win at Le Mans in 2000 in a Lola B2K/40 LMP675 that Multimatic helped develop, despite having to pull the gearbox not once but twice. (Holt’s unabridged account takes almost as long as the race.) There were also years running Porsches, a stellar class win at Sebring for Panoz, and nearly two decades of success with various iterations of Mustangs.

Multimatic’s relationship with Ford led to the company being present at the creation of the new Ford GT. Besides taking part in the design and engineering, Multimatic oversaw the car’s development. It now makes roughly half of the components that go into the Ford GT and assembles a car a day at an all-new Multimatic factory near Toronto. Two of the four GT race cars are campaigned at Le Mans and in the World Endurance Championship by Multimatic’s own U.K.-based racing operation.

In addition to running race cars, Multimatic is also a top-tier motorsport vendor. The company supplies brake ducts for the Mercedes-Benz F1 cars, bodywork for the Toyota LMP1 and World Rally Championship programs, and turnkey GT4 Mustangs for Ford. But Multimatic is best known for its Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve (DSSV) shock absorbers, which Holt invented after being frustrated in his efforts to mathematically predict how conventional shim dampers performed as hydraulic fluid flowed around the deflected shims on a piston inside a telescopic tube.

Chevrolet

“The simulation model became bigger than the entire car model that we were running the f***ing software on, because it’s so analog,” he says, pulling a shock-absorber textbook o a shelf in his office and pointing out various diagrams. “That’s when it occurred to me that pure orifice flow is totally predictable mathematically. So I thought, Why not just make a shape and have it move up and down, and as the pressure builds, it opens up more and more of the orifice? At any damper velocity, I can look at the shape of the orifice, measure the area, go to a fluid-dynamics textbook, and calculate the force on the shock. The thing that’s moving is called a spool. Every single f***ing hydraulic proportional control system in the world was controlled by spool valves—except shock absorbers.”

The first car fitted with Holt’s spool-valve damper was the Lola that Cristiano da Matta drove to the Champ Car championship in 2002. Sebastian Vettel won four consecutive F1 titles in Red Bulls riding on Multimatic shocks. These days, the dampers are found on eight F1 cars and hundreds of other race cars all over the world. Holt is equally proud of his patented production-car spool-valve dampers, which are standard equipment on the Chevy Camaro ZL1 1LE and Colorado ZR2. “I wouldn’t be happy just doing racing sh**,” he says. “I like to develop things. The challenge of doing a road car is completely different from doing a race car.”

Holt’s twin passions for racing and production cars makes him a perfect t for Multimatic. Which is good, because he wouldn’t t in anywhere else. “The guys I have problems with are the political animals,” he says. “If a guy who doesn’t know f***-all about cars is trying to run an engineering company, I can’t help but call that out. In the end, if you know enough, people want you to do their sh**, and you can act any way you want. To a certain extent, it’s self-perpetuating. People go, ‘If that guy can act like that, he must f***ing know what he’s talking about.’”

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