Introducing Godfrey Engineering: Design Tools Built by Engineers, for Engineers
Why we started Godfrey Engineering, what we believe about the state of engineering software, and where we're heading.
The Problem We Keep Seeing
Every engineering team we have worked with, from three-person motorsport outfits to tier-one automotive suppliers, runs into the same bottleneck. The design work itself is hard but tractable. The real friction is everything around it: tracking calculation assumptions, maintaining traceability between requirements and analysis, communicating design intent across disciplines, and ensuring that when one parameter changes the downstream consequences are understood.
Spreadsheets are the universal tool for this work. They are flexible, accessible, and universally understood. They are also completely inadequate for anything beyond a single-author, single-use calculation. There is no version control. No dependency graph. No audit trail. No way to compose a validated suspension kinematics calculation with a validated spring rate calculation and know that the interface between them is correct.
This is the problem Godfrey Engineering exists to solve.
Who We Are
Godfrey Engineering Ltd is a UK-based engineering consultancy and software company founded by Ben Godfrey, a mechanical design engineer with a background spanning motorsport, automotive OEM, and tier-one supplier work.
The company operates across two activities:
Engineering consultancy, mechanical design, suspension geometry, structural analysis, and design-for-manufacture work for automotive and motorsport clients. This is the domain experience that informs everything we build.
Engineering software, specifically, ChainSolve, a calculation management platform that treats engineering calculations as composable, version-controlled, auditable blocks rather than opaque spreadsheet cells.
These two activities feed each other directly. Consultancy work reveals the actual pain points that engineers face daily. Software development produces tools that make the consultancy work faster and more reliable. Neither exists in isolation.
What We Believe
A few convictions drive our approach:
Engineers should own their calculations. Not IT departments, not PLM administrators, not SaaS vendors who hold your data hostage. Your engineering knowledge is your competitive advantage. The tools you use to capture it should respect that.
Traceability is not optional. In safety-critical industries, automotive, aerospace, medical devices, being able to demonstrate that a design decision was based on a validated calculation, with known inputs and stated assumptions, is not a nice-to-have. It is a regulatory requirement and a professional obligation.
Composition beats monoliths. A suspension design calculation should be built from reusable, validated sub-calculations: spring rate, motion ratio, natural frequency, roll gradient. Each one tested independently, composed explicitly, with clear interfaces. This is how software engineers build reliable systems. Mechanical engineers deserve the same approach.
Open standards matter. Engineering data locked in proprietary formats is engineering data at risk. We build on open formats, document our schemas, and ensure that your work is exportable and portable.
What Comes Next
Over the coming months we will be publishing technical content here covering:
- Deep dives into ChainSolve’s architecture and the engineering problems it solves
- Thought leadership on calculation management, traceability, and design process
- Technical articles on automotive and motorsport engineering topics
- Behind-the-scenes looks at how we build our tools (Rust, WebAssembly, Astro)
If you are an engineer frustrated by the state of engineering calculation tools, or a team leader trying to improve traceability and knowledge capture in your organisation, we would like to hear from you. Reach out via our contact page or connect on LinkedIn.
Welcome to Godfrey Engineering.