McLaren Automotive is about to get the reboot we hoped it might avoid, but which history suggests was almost inevitable. The financial stability of sports and supercar makers is often inversely related to the desirability of their products, and their history makes for colourful reading. Most have changed hands more often than an old fiver, and the buyers bold enough to take them on and risk yet another bankruptcy are often not the typical corporate types.
Lamborghini has been owned by a 25-year-old Swiss kid and by Tommy Suharto, brother of the Indonesian dictator and later a convicted murderer. More suitable and deep-pocketed new owners can still be found, but the continuing troubles at Aston Martin and Lotus prove they need to be patient. Even being absorbed into a major group is no guarantee that a marque won’t be moved on again, as Bugatti is discovering. Ferrari proves that supercar makers can eventually find peace and profit, but with its unrivalled demand, pricing power and stock market valuation it is an outlier, and it took decades for Ferrari’s financial performance to match that of its cars.
McLaren Automotive emerged in 2010 after its predecessor, McLaren Cars, had been put into deep-freeze following the F1 and SLR; and briefly it looked like it might side-step the early decades of turmoil that such enterprises generally endure. It was properly funded: Ron Dennis and the other shareholders put £800m into it. Seldom has a sheet of paper been blanker: they didn’t have to build their new cars around an existing engine or engineering philosophy or factory, so were free to spend that money simply making the very best car they could, and the F1 had suggested their best was more than good enough technically, even though it never came close to realising the commercial aims of its founders. By then the Formula 1 team wasn’t quite in its late-1980s imperial phase then – both the team and Jenson Button finished second that year, 2011 – but it was beating Ferrari, and the organisation could plainly still execute.
