15 December 2022
Michael Leiters joined McLaren as CEO in July 2022; he is ex-Porsche and Ferrari.
‘What I heard from my team here is that in the past, we accepted a non-mature product and would launch it and deliver it to the customers. Artura was the first project where we didn’t do that. We saw that the car wasn’t mature, so we stopped deliveries. We already had a significant delay in our production line at the time, and we reduced production to zero cars a day to fix our quality problems.’
As reported the week before last, McLaren has recently sold some of its historic car collections to the Bahrain Sovereign Wealth Fund, Mumtalakat Holdings, to help with the satisfactory conclusion of the Artura. It is feared that the cash injection will still need to be more.
McLaren has opened talks with existing shareholders, including the Sovereign Wealth Funds of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, about injecting at least £250 million into the business in the coming months.
A final figure has yet to be determined, and one insider said it was likely to be higher than £ 250 million.
The McLaren ethos. No restraints. No limitations. We don’t simply push boundaries. We completely rethink them.
McLaren exists to create breathtaking performance road cars. And deliver the most thrilling driving experiences imaginable.
Stick to your ethos, Guys.