It was in 1982 that Kees made his first copper and brass radiator out the back of his auto wreckers business in Dennington and began manufacturing radiators.

“It was something that was being manufactured by a national company in Melbourne at the time but it was very hard to get service and so on,” he said.

“I looked at it and I thought, ‘it can’t be that hard to make’. So I decided to put a bit of effort into trying to make a radiator.”

In 1987 he decided to move to the Gold Coast to service the 10 radiator shops between Southport and Tweed Heads.

“It just seemed as if the minute I moved away from Victoria, everybody wanted to deal with me and we got run off our feet,” he said.

Kees was born in Holland and moved to Australia when he was one, growing up on a dairy farm at Cooriemungle.

After he finished school at Timboon he took up an apprenticeship at Henderson Motors in Colac in 1967. He then spent a year working at a copper mine on Bouganville Island in Papua New Guinea as a heavy equipment diesel mechanic.

When he returned, he operated service stations in Camperdown and Geelong before he bought the auto wreckers business in 1980 and moved to Warrnambool.

After almost a decade in Queensland, they put in their first aluminium furnace which baked together aluminium products.

“Paul, my son, he was 17 in 1996 and doing his apprenticeship at work as a fitter/machinist and I said to him: ‘I think there might be a market to manufacture aluminium radiators for racing, like V8 Supercars and sprintcars and all that sort of thing,” Kees said.

“So while he was doing his apprenticeship he did a TAFE course for welding and that’s how PWR got started – PWR got started at Paul Weel Radiators.”

In 2003 they sold out of K&J Thermal Products – the company they had started in 1987 – and kept the PWR side of the business.

“I said to Paul, ‘let’s put a bit of horsepower behind it’, as in a few dollars and invest a bit of stuff, so we built this brand new building where we’re at now in 2005-6,” Kees said.

“When we started building this building, I actually made a statement that ‘we are building a building with the right infrastructure to go after the rest of the world’, which was a bit of throwaway line in 2004-5 when we were designing this building.

“It was a throwaway line, but that’s where we kicked a fairly significant goal -building this building and attracting some good staff and good engineering.”

But then the Global Financial Crisis hit and the bank valued his purpose-built facility at less than what it cost to construct.

“The bank put their hand out and asked for a tidy sum, I won’t tell you how much, but it was a significant amount of money. They wanted some money quickly.”

So Kees and Paul sold houses and factories to pay the bank.

“I think it’s the old story. When your back’s against the wall you come out and have a fair-dinkum crack,” Kees said.

“I went to NASCAR in America in 2008 and signed a deal with Jack Roush, who owns a significant Ford NASCAR team, and within two years we had 50 per cent of all the NASCAR business, just doing it from here.”

In 2009, they went to a motorsports show in Cologne, Germany. “That’s where we met some people that asked us about manufacturing and designing a F1 radiator and in 2009 we made our first F1 radiator and things have progressed on from there,” he said.

“Now we have 100 per cent of the NASCAR business and we have 90 per cent of the F1 business in all the cooling.”

PWR Performance Products also make coolers for electronics and electronic boards for Google and aerospace company SpaceX.

“There’s probably not many motorsport categories in the world that we don’t have something to do with. We’re certainly doing a lot in the alternative-type cooling, as in battery cooling, in the likes of battery and energy storage cooling,” Kees said.

“We are certainly getting into a lot of those projects around the world which is pretty exciting because that’s another part of our business that not too many people are in.

“We just do everything about air, oil and water cooling. That’s all we do.”

In November last year, they company was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange and, since its debut, the share price has increased about 100 per cent.

“I think that one of the biggest accomplishments that happened when we floated the company was it was a good chance for a lot of employees to be involved in the success,” Kees said. 

More than 50 employees took up shares and are now reaping the rewards of the successful business.

And the listing on the ASX means the business now has a value of around $300 million. “It is very hard to say that. We’re just ordinary guys having a go. I grew up around Camperdown and Warrnambool and those places. We’re just country guys having a go,” Kees said.

“It’s a story from humble beginnings. I keep saying to people, anybody can achieve success if they put their heart and mind to it, that’s for sure. At the end of the day, we just love doing what we do.”

But running a business which employs 130 people in Australia and 60 in the US is demanding. “Ninety per cent of our business is export. We’re extremely busy,” Kees said.

In May last year they bought CNR Racing which is based in Indianapolis in the US. “It’s basically a fabrication and engineering shop which does a lot of cooling products. It doesn’t manufacture any cooling products. We still do all the manufacturing here, but they do the welding and engineering and final process work over there,” Kees said.

“My son Paul, he’s been running the place for six months trying to get what we call a bit of PWR DNA into the business we bought over there which is going very well.

“We’ll do at least three trips to Europe a year, and we’re in America nearly every other week just about. It’s just ridiculous.

“Sometimes when we fly over there we spend more time in the air than we’re actually on the ground, which is a pain, but it’s just what you’ve got to do from working in Australia. You’re so far away from everything.

“It also goes to show it can be done and we call the world flat. The world’s flat with plenty of opportunity.”

And while they may do a lot of work for the best racing teams in the world, it doesn’t mean they get to spend lots of time track-side. “A lot of people think we do. We don’t because we’re so damned busy,” Kees said.

“We probably go to two of three NASCAR or F1 races when all the engineers are together.”

Paul spent 12 seasons as a V8 super car driver from the late ’90s, and in the late ’70s Kees raced salon cars. 

“I’ve certainly got a lot of memories of Warrnambool and the speedway. We love it, it’s a fantastic place,” Kees said. “I drove a little bit. I wasn’t the world’s best driver, that’s for sure.”

Kees has found more success as the driving force behind his Aussie business that is now attracting a lot of attention from both the media and politicians.

“It is a good story. We employ a lot of people. We export 90 per cent of our stuff around the world. It’s a good story. A good Australian story. Home-made, down-to-earth people, no-nonsense and supplying the best in the world," Kees said. “We employ a lot of apprentices and work with the local schools and all that sort of stuff.”

He is also bucking the trend by not moving his business offshore. “We love it here. It’s a great, very strong employment base with engineering,” he said.

“We owe a lot to the people who helped us get here. That’s why we’ll never move manufacturing offshore.”