DEEP in the heart of Upper Bukit Timah, behind the closed gates of an innocuous-looking light industrial building, Peter Ho is busy doing more or less what he's been doing his whole life - tooling around with mechanical parts and coming up with practical solutions to specific engineering problems. Of course, the stakes are a little higher since the time he was a five-year-old trying to build a working sewing machine with a Meccano construction set, but the parallels are definitely there.

Mr Ho and childhood friend Michael Leong are engineering whizzes and founding partners of Hope Technik, a company that specialises in the re-engineering of engines to suit a particular application. Their clients include international motorsports teams, bio-medical companies, public sector firms and also the Singapore military - not bad for a two-year-old company that was set up with just $10,000.

Both Mr Ho, 30, and Mr Leong, 29, are mechanical engineering graduates from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where they were also key members of the university team to the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) race, an annual inter-varsity competition held in Michigan to design, build and race a Formula-style car. This year will mark the sixth time that students from NUS will be taking part in the competition.

Messrs Ho and Leong also worked in motorsports as engineers with Team Petronas during its British and Asian touring car championship campaigns.

There is a perpetual hum at the Hope Technik premises. A converted half-container parked in front of the building holds a dynamometer - a machine that measures torque and horsepower - which is switched on for long periods and attached to an engine that is being tested to its limits. It has recorded data for every thing from a tiny 34cc aero-model engine to a three-litre automotive engine.

Together with Jeff Tang, the company's 'third wheel' and an expert at engineering design using computers, the partners pride themselves on being able to provide workable, cost-effective solutions in a limited time.

Over the past 18 months, they have worked on over 50 projects of varying size, and Mr Ho estimates that the company turnover for the current financial year should exceed $1 million.

'We think we can grow it a lot more,' he says. 'People ask for extreme engineering solutions - you give us a problem, we fix it.' He adds: 'It's high-performance engineering where you're not looking for an off-the-shelf solution. It's not regular work. We have a certain set of skills and the jobs are so diverse, but we come from a motorsports background, where the working culture is used to fast-paced engineering solutions.'

Mr Leong says some of the solutions feature 'bleeding edge' technology. 'We do the design and testing ourselves, and work with short lead times,' he says.

While they cannot reveal too much about some of the projects, there is plenty on the motorsports front they can be proud of. For instance, their design of a transmission oil pump is arguably the lightest in the world. The components were sourced from abroad, built to their specifications and sold under the Hope Technik brand.

They are also one of only five sellers in the world of an air-jack exhaust valve, part of a package that helps to reduce the time during a pit stop. Meanwhile their all-aluminium version of an 'elephant leg' - which allows a car to be raised to twice its normal height in a garage - is used by customers like Jaguar Motorsports and Le Mans prototypes.

'We relate to the motorsports life,' says Mr Ho, who adds that Hope Technik products already enjoy distribution in Europe and Japan. 'We have outperformed the established players and are benchmarked against what the rest of the world can achieve,' he says. 'Our objective is to become world players.'

There is a can-do attitude - a positive blend of pride, enthusiasm and yes, hope at Hope Technik, where solving previously unsolvable problems for big name clients also happens to be lots of fun. Mr Ho and company have come a long way from poring over books on aerodynamics and engine technology - but one thing hasn't changed.

'We've built our own cars, worked professionally for racing teams and now we have a showcase for what we can do,' says Mr Ho. 'Motorsports is still a hobby, but all this came about from our love of cars.'