Things are looking up for the beleaguered supercar manufacturer.
He lost half a leg in a crash while filming Le Mans with Steve McQueen in 1969, but he insisted they use the footage. He bought his racing cars directly from Enzo Ferrari, and I met him at the factory during an extravagant five-day birthday party the company had thrown for itself. “It used to be pretty impoverished here,” he said as we sat under a parasol on Ferrari’s scented herbal lawn.
“I first came to see Enzo in 1962. It was cold, so I asked his chief engineer to turn the heating on while I waited. He apologized, and told me that they couldn’t afford the oil.” Almost every supercar maker has seen tough times. The more your cars cost to develop and buy, the more exposed you are to cashflow problems and your customers’ varying ability to pay for your very nice things through recessions and oil crises.
Aston Martin has been bankrupt seven times during its 112-year history and changed hands more often than an old banknote. Lamborghini, now a stable and reputable member of the Volkswagen Group, was once bought out of bankruptcy by a 25-year-old Swiss millionaire and was also owned by Tommy Suharto, son of the former Indonesian dictator and later a convicted murderer.
And now it’s McLaren’s turn for a wobble. The road car division of the Formula 1 team seems to have everything going for it. Its current range of two seat supercars is critically acclaimed. The McLaren F1 of 1992, arguably the greatest road car ever made, cost $815,000 new but you’ll need at least $20m to buy one now, which says a lot about the appeal of the brand. And the McLaren F1 team is rampant again, winning last year’s constructor’s title and leading this year’s drivers’ and constructors’ world championships by a chasm.
But costs are high, sales are slow and in 2023, the last year for which numbers have been made public, McLaren Automotive lost in the region of $1.1bn, enough to make even its previous owners, the Saudi and Bahraini sovereign wealth funds, blanch. But a very modern salvation is at hand. CYVN — pronounced SIGH-ven — is a division of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund that invests in mobility.
In 2021 it founded Forseven, a shadowy UK-based start-up that was developing a new range of hybrid and electric luxury cars in utter secrecy, drawing on the tech of NIO, the clever Chinese EV maker in which CYVN had also invested. Forseven was just a cover name: the cars would be sold under a new brand. Within three years Forseven had 700 staff.
It was led by Nick Collins, the British engineer who had developed the brilliant new Range Rover and Defender while at Land Rover. He learned that McLaren Automotive could be bought separately from the F1 team, and realized that it would not only provide a ready-made, world-renowned brand for Forseven’s new cars, but that those cars would also be the saving of McLaren.
Unless you do it in tiny numbers, building sports cars alone is seldom enough to survive. Ferrari, Lamborghini and Aston Martin have all diversified into four doors and four seats, but Porsche is the single most successful example of this very necessary trend. Each marque’s purist fans tend to hate the new models at first, but then they realize their profits bring stability, and pay for more and better sports cars.
Developing new models is costly. McLaren couldn’t afford to do it alone, but unlike any other potential investor, Forseven had already done the hard work, and that’s the secret sauce behind the merger. It was only finalized in April, but Collins was so confident that it would happen that Forseven’s cars were being developed with the intention of becoming McLarens for at least a year beforehand, though few of his staff knew it. Some of those new cars will be revealed later this year, and everything the new McLaren will launch until 2030 has already been designed.
I spoke to Collins recently. The Forseven name has disappeared, and he is now the CEO of McLaren. He is clever and thoughtful, but tough. He talks about this being the opposite of a quick-buck private-equity deal, and says that he and his investors take a 50-year view, as perhaps you have to with supercar makers. A little over 50 years after David Piper shivered outside Enzo’s office, Ferrari went public and its share price has risen almost tenfold since then. With a very clever, very modern lifeline uniting a famous British name with Gulf money and Chinese tech, maybe McLaren could go the same way.
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