If you want to hot up the performance of your car's engine, the team at Kelford Cams has 40 years of expertise and will help you turn your car into a fire-breathing race winner.

Kelford Cams was founded by engineer Norm Kelly, and Ron Rutherford, a car racer and tuner. They combined their skills and formed the company 40 years ago. The company quickly established itself as one of the best and by 1993 (when it was sold to second owner Grant Hart), the company was catering for almost everyone in every form of motor racing in New Zealand.

To this day the company is still sticking to its core business of manufacturing camshafts but also offer the entire camshaft related component range. The sales team is headed by Phil Harbison, who has been with Kelford for 25 years and the wealth of knowledge and experience over four decades of doing the same thing is part of the reason Kelford Cams are trusted by groups such as NZ V8 Touring cars to supply their camshafts.

The current owner, Kevin Ban purchased the company in 2002 and decided to step it up a level and create export quality products. At the time the company was also focusing at the traditional motorsport market including traditional American V8s and English bred engines; however Ban saw an opening in a different market and decided to pounce. "No one at doing a good job catering for high performance Japanese vehicles, so we decided to branch out into that market," he says. "And that has snowballed for us."

According to Ban, Kiwis have always been good at modifying cars and since Japanese cars have been imported into this country for so long, more people are turning to modifying them. "Because of this, we have had this massive head start on the rest of the world at developing products, which has really played into our hands and now our products are going global."

The Kelford Cams team members are experts at making and exporting camshafts. For all those non boy racers, a camshaft allows the valves in the engine to move up and down. A cam shaft can be altered to make a vehicle go faster.

Everything accelerated two years ago when Ban made the huge business decision to invest in a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) Camshaft grinder, the first one and to this day the only one in the southern hemisphere. "We knew we had to take this direction if we wanted to compete at the highest level," Ban says. "We went into it with no jobs hoping like hell we were going to get the markets we were after."

Ban did get the markets he was after and because his business is doing so well he has ordered another machine to keep up with demand. Currently the team at Kelford Cams is cranking out over 200 camshafts a week and hope to double their productivity with the addition of the new machine.

Teams across all levels of motorsport are using Kelford camshafts, from speedway to circuit racing and high performance road car enthusiasts. "The new design systems and CNC machine has allowed us to successfully cater for top level of motor sport," Ban says. "We are doing work with leading US based drag race and Oval track race teams. And we also work with teams in Australian V8 Supercars." And because of this, although Ban had to dish out a fair deal of cash for the investment, he thinks it's worth every cent. "Spend first and spend big to hopefully make big," is the philosophy for Ban. "If you believe in what you are doing, it will come."

In its 40th year the company is now bringing in over $2.5 million worth of business every year and is exporting more than 75 percent of its products around the globe, with the biggest market being America. The company is doing so well that it was named as a finalist in last year's export awards and business excellence awards.

"Our motto is 'better by design', every day we try to be better than we were yesterday," Ban says. "We never stay stagnant. For example, one particular camshaft has had eight revisions in the quest for perfection. We just keep getting better as we do more R&D and as new technology comes along."