► McLaren’s new Forseven & CYVN owners explained
► Win on track, lose millions on the road
► How will new boss Nick Collins turn that around?
Nick Collins runs an established British supercar maker with a very famous name and capable of making some incandescent cars, but which lost nearly a billion pounds in 2023 and which requires redundancies, a rethink of its existing models and the same expansion into SUVs which Ferrari, Lamborghini and Aston made and which purists will doubtless hate.
Collins has gone from the almost-invisible to the painfully public; from clean-sheet to urgent fix. In January 2024 the 50-year-old left Jaguar Land Rover after a stellar nine years in which he’d led the development of the new Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Defender. He was lured away by the offer of the CEO’s job at Forseven, the somewhat shadowy start-up funded by CYVN (pronounced SIGH-ven), the mobility-focused arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
Founded just two years previously and based at sites in Bicester and Leamington Spa, Forseven was operating in stealth mode, hoovering up some of Britain’s best engineers and designers to develop a range of luxury cars to be sold under a new brand.
After he joined CYVN it bought Gordon Murray Technology and a 20 per cent stake in Chinese car maker Nio, and in April it bought McLaren Automotive too, installing Collins as CEO and merging Forseven into it, along with a workforce which had grown from 250 to 700 in his short time there.
‘The opportunity was too good to ignore. We were going to create an all-new brand at Forseven. That was probably our biggest challenge. We had a very good plan: we had the name and the artwork and the launch plan. But McLaren already is a luxury brand, a storied brand, and one that we felt we had the capability to nurture and develop and see through. Our branding was effectively done, but we did it in parallel with this deal in case it didn’t come through.”
And it was the same with the cars Forseven was developing. ‘We pivoted everything we did fully into this. Everything we were doing was likely to be under the McLaren brand. But not everybody in the team knew that. So we had this slightly awkward thing sometimes where everybody’s looking at me as if to say, “Why are you making that decision, Nick?”‘
A life-long car nut from Essex, he was sponsored through his mechanical engineering degree by Ford, where he spent over 20 years before joining JLR. We’ll forgive him his project management of the StreetKa in return for his role as chief project engineer – aged just 26 – on the mid-noughties Fiesta ST.
Around that time Aston Martin was still part of the Ford group and Nick put becoming its CEO at the top of his career plan. He’s ended up in a job that’s not far off. As we talk in his office at the the still extraordinary, Norman Foster-designed McLaren Technology Centre near Woking, I admire the bonnet hung on wall, painted freehand with an image of Bruce McLaren by someone in the McLaren Special Operations bespoke division, and he quotes the founder a couple of times in our chat.
‘I’ve always loved motor racing, and I loved McLaren. I grew up in that Prost-Senna, Marlboro-McLaren era which I still think is one of the most evocative in F1. They were beautifully simple cars to look at, with phenomenal characters driving them. And I loved the fact that McLaren was a real technology company, pushing the boundaries of what could be done. I did some consulting work here 10 years ago between other jobs, and got the sense that there were some very highly technically capable people doing quite a lot with not very much.’
So what did he find when he got here this time? What accounted for the eye-watering losses? What needs to be fixed immediately, before the Forseven-developed McLarens arrive?
‘I think they were a bit stuck in the challenges and constraints of the business, and as a result had become a bit hesitant on action, which is why we’ve gone very quick on a few things. There was a little bit of “Please just make quick decisions because there’s some obvious things that need doing and it’s almost weird that it’s not happening?”. So even some of the difficult decisions we’ve made have been met with a degree of relief.’
Among other things, the dealer network was massively overstocked, so that will be cut by half this year, encouraging more buyers to order from the factory and add bespoke finishes. That should drive up profits and residuals, which in turn encourages buyers to buy again. The company’s debts were written off in the purchase, and Nick hasn’t been afraid to revise forthcoming McLaren-developed cars if he doesn’t think they’re good enough.
He won’t say what and how, just that “we’ve acted very fast on some things that are in flight and that are quite imminent to the market, to revise those things and invest more to make them an even better proposition.”
He has driven the W1, on the same day that he drove a P1 (‘That was a good day in the office’) but doesn’t say if it’s one of the models being revised. And while the present range all drive brilliantly, Nick sees some more fundamental problems with the cars which are affecting McLaren’s profitability and its breadth of appeal, and which can’t be fixed until those models are replaced.
‘They are quite similar in proportion and concept, but there’s relatively poor commonality between them so you don’t get efficiency of scale. Yet we don’t have the diversity of portfolio for the consumer. And some of the cars I think could have evolved more from a design perspective.’
But what everyone wants to know, and Nick also won’t tell, yet, is what the McLaren line-up looks like once those present cars have been replaced and the Forseven-developed cars are added. Will there be saloons? SUVs? Will the new models be EV-only, using some of Nio’s propulsion tech? There will be a big product announcement later in the year.
‘We know – give or take 10 per cent – everything we’ll do through 2030, and we have a design model of everything. There will be more of what we’ve always done, but even better, and then entry to some adjacent segments. You’ll definitely see something with more than two seats, but that still leaves us in quite a wide territory. And as I said, even in two-seat territory, we could have a lot more diversity there.’
Before the glamour of a big product reveal later this year, there’s some pain to go through. Tariffs on exports to the US, McLaren’s biggest market, are up from 2.5 per cent to 10 per cent, but at least the UK’s early trade deal means they’re fixed, and currently less than rivals exporting from the EU will pay. There are likely to be some layoffs too, but they may be mitigated by the growth plans.
And there will be help from the unusual but very modern automotive group which CYVN is assembling, with Middle Eastern money, some brilliant British talent, and Chinese tech. ‘You’ll see Nio components in McLarens much sooner than you think at a component level, even in the current range,’ Nick says. But the access to its computing power might be as much of an advantage, helping Woking to develop its new models at the ‘China speed’ the industry is currently obsessed with. ‘We’ve been working with them to make a better McLaren faster,’ he says. ‘Not as in a faster car, but in a faster time.’
There’s also the tailwind that ought to be provided by the association with the F1 team. CYVN took a minority stake in the racing side when it bought the car business from Mumtalakat, the Bahraini sovereign wealth fund, with Collins joining the board of the race team and talking to Zak Brown ‘on an almost daily basis’. As we speak, the McLaren F1 team has more than twice the points of its closest rival, Ferrari. But its success and the profitability of the road cars seem almost inversely proportional, the latter racking up its largest loss just as the F1 team was entering its current imperial phase.
Collins can also call on the impressive brains trust that CYVN has assembled on the McLaren board including the 77-year-old Luca di Montezemolo, who oversaw a similar and very successful transformation of Ferrari’s road cars in the ’90s. But his greatest asset might be his investors: well-resourced, and he says well-intentioned and well-motivated to turn McLaren around.
‘They take a very bold view of the future,’ Nick says. ‘A European mindset is very incrementalist and we’re not here to be incremental. They are also absolutely committed and take a long-term perspective. This is not a two- to three-year, private equity type deal. Nor is it the other end of the spectrum, a vanity project where they’ll fund losses forever. We want to build a business that can generate free cashflow, that can fund its own future. Only if we do that will we ever create the kind of legacy that we’re talking about.
‘I want people many, many years down the line to be able to come to work at McLaren. We shouldn’t be taking a 10-year horizon. We should be building a company for 50 years down the line. That may sound a bit grand, but that’s what we are trying to achieve.’