Sarum Hydraulics love cars and are passionate about design. We were blown away with the McLaren stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed earlier in the summer. Wow!
Last week, the big F1 news was that Jenson Button plans to stay at McLaren for the 2016 season. McLaren are a world beating F1 team, but don’t forget the road cars that share the same DNA.
Brands are big in the motor industry. They are probably even bigger than the lump of metal underneath them. In spite of current travails, Sarum have always been VW fans, viewing Bernd Pischetsrieder as very shrewd when, as Chief Executive of VW, he purchased Skoda, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Seat. At the time people were dubious that the public would be cynical that a certain Skoda and VW shared the same parts. Time has proved him right, and Sarum Hydraulics would happily all drive round in Skodas at a fair old discount to the premium VW. We don’t think that people have stopped buying Lamborghini’s because a lot of the engine is common with an Audi. This said, the engineering and quality has to be present, which was very much our good old VW until the recent bombshell. They will bounce back!
Sarum Hydraulics Production Director Jon soaks up McLaren at Goodwood
There are instances where “badge engineering” just has not worked as well as was hoped. Some fairly, some not at all. People Sarum know who had Jaguar X types actually thought they were lovely cars. It is just so tricky to navigate through relationships in the motor industry. If one fabulous sports car manufacturer used to pride itself on lovely hand built engines but now lives on a vee engine made from two high volume engines merged into a V8, does anybody care? Certainly journalist and style setters don’t bother or maybe don’t even realise. Probably the standards of mass produced cars are so high now that finding a mass market starter motor on your 150K sports car is no big deal.
Go upmarket and Herr Piestrader saw an amazing opportunity in Bentley. Having been unable to acquire the Rolls Royce name (for complicated reasons, so legend has it), VW built an amazing business in Derby. They bolted together a classic name in Bentley (despite it having played second fiddle to Rolls for years), revisited the nostalgic years of “Bentley Boys” racing by making some beautiful Le Mans cars, used a top flight platform from the VW Phaeton plus a lovely body design and the rest is history. People flocked to buy the Bentley Continental. Yes, footballers loved them, but so did a massive number of other punters throughout the world. They re-built the brand into something that people aspired to and had the engineering to back it up. On top of that, VW had deep pockets to follow the whole thing through. History tells us that freewheeling entrepreneurial action and big, rich bureaucratic companies don’t generally sit well together. This seems like an exception.
Bentley Boys at Le Mans
McLaren didn’t have the deep pockets of a major manufacturer. It did not have a parts bin to shop from. It had the innovative design heritage from Formula One, stretching back to Bruce McLaren (who died in 1970) and latterly Ron Dennis. McLaren were visionaries who saw an opportunity to build a British business, manufacturing a cutting edge road sports car to take on Ferrari and Lamborghini head on. Others have tried. Maybe McLaren has something special. It is right up there as an employer of choice for Engineering talent. That must say something.
And what a success the business has been. Last year, McLaren sold some 1400 of its beautiful sports cars worldwide from the space-age plant in Woking. Their plan is to get the production up to around 4000 vehicles per annum over the next few years as new models are added to the range. In comparison, Aston Martin sold 4,000 cars and Bentley around 10,000 vehicles. Ferrari are up at 7,000 vehicles, interestingly of which around 650 came to Blighty.
What are the opportunities? Is the car right up there with Ferrari and Lamborghinis as both something people aspire to and also competitive on engineering? It would seem so. Will a pedigree of exciting engineering honed in Formula One excite people? We think so. Could the brand move to other types of vehicle? Probably. People just don’t like a brand watered down, something that is unreliable or brand engineering that is too obvious. The Aston Martin badge on the Toyota iQ to produce their “Cygnet” was not very convincing! Yes, there was another story there, but we are not sure that Aston enthusiasts would have been very sure.
What are the threats? Other than the worry of sales to China evaporating, there is always the concern that you are playing against people who have very deep pockets. If VW develop a new engine, it will feed a few brands selling big numbers plus design spins offs will feed into the whole range which uses 10 million engines a year. Development is relentless. Ferrari is still part of Fiat, although we understand that an IPO is still on target for 2016. Lamborghini is VW. The sums of money to keep competitive with the big players tend to push independents out of the game. For example, one change in emissions regulations could be all it takes to really pile the pressure on a niche manufacturer.
The death of the sports car has been talked about since the 1970’s oil crisis. We don’t think it is going to happen. Yes, it might evolve into mega fast accelerating electric sports cars, but McLaren have the pedigree to grasp an engineering need and make it happen. That is Formula One down to a tee. This is what they excel at.
A name to watch.
Oh, there is the million dollar question. Can and should McLaren remain independent of the major manufacturers? Would sharing an engine with another range compromise the engineering, if your whole ethos is to make precisely what you need? The answer is that we don’t know. We are just designers and manufacturers of rugged Micropac hydraulic pumps, so look what we do on www.sarum-hydraulics.co.uk . That said, we are passionate about design and the long heritage of world beating British innovation. For our money, McLaren is the future of sports cars and British engineering at its best.
As always, comments welcome.
It makes you wonder if McLaren has upstage Aston Martin as the premier British sports car brand.
Julian, yes it is a fascinating world. Time has moved on even since that blog. It’s a different world. The evolution of electric cars casts a big shadow over all these marques. Where does it go? Both Aston and McLaren have had quite a bit more investment. Endless discussions here at Sarum on where the motor industry goes. We’ll await your blog on “what vehicles have an Aston and McLaren badge in 2033.” What we are sure on is that the world won’t end its love affair with exotic sports cars. Thank you for the interest.