McLaren: Britain Built the Legend. Then It Had to Sell It.

One name, two completely different stories

To understand what happened to McLaren, we must first separate two businesses that share the same name.

McLaren Racing operates the Formula 1 team and McLaren’s other motorsport interests. It declined spectacularly after the Hamilton era before engineering an extraordinary recovery.

McLaren Automotive is the modern road-car manufacturer. It built magnificent machines but repeatedly struggled to turn technical brilliance into a financially sustainable company.

Ron Dennis created a magnificent machine

Ron Dennis transformed McLaren from a racing operation into something approaching a British technology empire.

His McLaren delivered championships with Lauda, Prost, Senna and Häkkinen; the McLaren F1 road car; the Mercedes partnership; Lewis Hamilton’s development; the immaculate McLaren Technology Centre; and the belief that Britain could build its own Ferrari.

The architecture mattered.

Everything was spotless, controlled and futuristic. McLaren was not merely selling cars. It was selling technical perfection.

But perfection was expensive.

Dennis wanted McLaren to become a permanent road-car manufacturer, not a boutique producing one exceptional car every decade. That meant factories, engineers, tooling, dealers, warranties, new platforms and a continuous stream of new products.

The ambition was spectacular. The underlying capital base was comparatively small.

The owners removed the man who built it

By the middle of the 2010s, relations between Dennis and his long-standing partners had deteriorated.

Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat held approximately half of the company. Dennis and his long-standing business partner Mansour Ojjeh each held approximately a quarter.

Dennis attempted to secure the finance necessary to take control. He failed. Ojjeh and Mumtalakat moved against him, and after an unsuccessful High Court attempt to prevent his suspension, Dennis was removed in 2016.

He sold his remaining shares the following year.

Without Dennis, there would have been no modern McLaren as we understand it. But the company had also become inseparable from the scale of his ambition.

Lewis Hamilton escaped the decline

Lewis Hamilton left McLaren for Mercedes at the end of 2012. At the time, the decision appeared reckless.

McLaren was an established championship-winning team. Mercedes had won only one race since returning to Formula 1 as a constructor.

The move now looks almost prophetic.

Hamilton did not cause McLaren’s decline. He recognised the direction in which Formula 1 was moving before much of the sport did.

Mercedes was building an integrated works operation for the coming hybrid era. McLaren was losing its privileged relationship with Mercedes and searching for a new path.

Its 2013 car failed. The team then reunited with Honda, promising the rebirth of a historic partnership. Instead, the cars were slow and unreliable. By 2017, McLaren finished ninth out of ten constructors.

Lewis Hamilton did not break McLaren. He simply left before the scale of its decline became visible to everyone else.

The road-car expansion looked healthier than it was

McLaren Automotive officially began in 2010. The MP4-12C was followed by an increasingly busy succession of models and derivatives: the 650S, 675LT, 570S, 570GT, 600LT, 720S, GT, Senna, Speedtail, Elva and others.

Many were technically outstanding. Some were astonishing.

But McLaren attempted to compress decades of brand and product development into little more than a decade.

A new car attracted attention and generated orders. Then came a faster derivative, a Longtail, a limited edition or a replacement.

For the factory, the launches kept production moving. For existing customers, every new announcement risked making the car they had just bought feel old.

The used market developed a reputation for heavy depreciation. That weakened customer confidence, finance values and dealer appetite for stock.

McLaren was never simply a smaller Ferrari

Ferrari is not merely another company producing fast cars. It has spent generations building a system around exclusivity.

It controls supply, protects the desirability of its products and extracts enormous sums from personalisation. Its customers do not merely purchase a car. They buy entry into an established hierarchy of ownership, history and status.

McLaren possessed racing history. It did not possess Ferrari’s extraordinary ability to convert scarcity, identity and customer loyalty into profit.

The quality problem was real

McLaren’s reputation for reliability and build quality is often discussed through internet anecdotes. Some owners report excellent experiences; others describe warning lights, electrical faults, hydraulic failures and lengthy dealer visits.

Anecdotes alone do not prove every McLaren was unreliable.

McLaren’s own accounts, however, confirm that quality became a business problem.

The company acknowledged spending money on enhanced quality procedures, additional testing and validation. These measures temporarily reduced production and generated additional costs. Its accounts also recorded inventory impairments connected partly with product changes and quality improvements.

Warranty costs are especially dangerous to a small manufacturer. McLaren must estimate the future cost of repairing every car it sells. When a previously unknown problem appears after launch, that cost can rise rapidly.

The Artura arrived when McLaren could least afford trouble

The Artura brought a new carbon-fibre structure, a new V6 engine, a hybrid system and an entirely new electrical architecture.

It was precisely the technological leap McLaren needed—and almost the worst possible programme for a cash-constrained manufacturer to get wrong.

Its launch suffered delays involving semiconductors, suppliers, software and quality work. Cars were later recalled in several markets because a low-pressure fuel pipe could detach and create a fire risk.

That does not mean the finished Artura was a bad car. It was frequently praised by reviewers. The problem was that McLaren could not afford a prolonged and difficult launch of the vehicle on which its recovery depended.

McLaren began selling itself to survive

The emergency was followed by a succession of transactions.

• McLaren Racing Minority stake sold
• Technology Centre Sold for £170 million
• Woking campus Leased back for 20 years
• McLaren Applied Sold to Greybull Capital

The headquarters transaction was not automatically irrational. Sale-and-leasebacks are common corporate financing tools.

But McLaren was not selling its headquarters from a position of strength. It was converting ownership into urgently needed cash.

The numbers became brutal

McLaren Automotive’s accounts reveal the scale of what happened.

That does not mean McLaren physically burned through £923.9 million in cash during those 12 months. The total included:

• Asset impairment £375.0m
• Amortisation £126.6m
• Interest and similar costs £92.9m
• Tax charge £80.6m

But those figures cannot simply be dismissed as accounting tricks.

An impairment is an admission that an asset is no longer expected to generate the value previously claimed for it. McLaren had invested enormous sums developing cars and technology. It was now acknowledging that part of that investment was worth considerably less than its books had suggested.

Even before tax, McLaren Automotive lost £843.3 million in 2023.

It improved in 2024—and still lost another £177 million

McLaren Automotive staged a meaningful recovery in 2024. Sales increased by 42%, turnover rose by 84% and the 750S improved the product mix.

The recovery was real. But the company still recorded a final loss of £176.9 million, while current liabilities exceeded current assets by £742.3 million.

Accumulated losses had reached £1.864 billion.

During the same year, McLaren spent almost £190 million developing current and future vehicles.

Bahrain became the owner because Bahrain provided the money

Mumtalakat had been involved with McLaren since 2007. As the company required additional support, the Bahraini sovereign wealth fund progressively increased its position.

In 2023, it bought £400 million of McLaren-related shares and warrants previously held by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Ares Management.

A full recapitalisation followed.

By March 2024, Mumtalakat had become McLaren Group’s sole shareholder.

McLaren was therefore not a healthy British company suddenly stolen by a foreign buyer. It had relied on foreign capital for years. The investor repeatedly supplying that support eventually acquired control.

Rescue money is not charity. It purchases ownership.

Then Abu Dhabi took the road cars

In April 2025, Abu Dhabi-owned CYVN Holdings acquired McLaren Automotive from Mumtalakat.

CYVN combined it with Forseven, an electric-vehicle start-up it already controlled. Forseven’s Nick Collins became chief executive of the new automotive group, while McLaren Automotive boss Michael Leiters departed.

The unified McLaren was effectively divided. The manufacturer remained in Britain, but it was now owned by an investment company controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi.

CYVN supplied equity that allowed the Automotive business to repay:

That was not a minor investment in a promising brand. It was a financial rescue.

Employees paid for each reinvention

The approximately 1,200 planned job losses in 2020 were followed by another restructuring after the Forseven merger.

In 2025, up to 500 positions were placed at risk, including roles across engineering, design, IT, legal and other shared functions.

The merged company also created approximately 300 positions, meaning this was partly the removal of duplicated roles rather than the simple disappearance of 500 factory jobs.

But for employees, the corporate distinction offers limited comfort.

McLaren had again reached a new strategy by placing existing jobs at risk.

Workers helped build the cars, solve the engineering problems and preserve the brand. They did not emerge owning any more of it.

The racing team completed the opposite journey

While Automotive was being rescued, McLaren Racing became one of Formula 1’s greatest turnaround stories.

Zak Brown rebuilt the commercial operation and restored McLaren’s papaya identity. Andrea Stella created a calmer, more effective technical organisation. Formula 1’s cost cap limited the ability of the largest teams to outspend their rivals indefinitely.

McLaren returned to winning races and championships.

The piece of McLaren sold during the emergency became several times more valuable.

The road-car company created to commercialise McLaren’s racing heritage remained the part requiring rescue.

Is McLaren still British?

The cars are designed and assembled in Britain. McLaren employs British workers, trains British engineers and supports an extensive network of suppliers.

Its carbon-fibre structures are produced in Sheffield. Its racing and automotive operations remain centred around Woking.

That is real. It should not be dismissed.

But ownership is also real.

The headquarters is owned by a landlord. McLaren Automotive is controlled by Abu Dhabi’s CYVN. McLaren Racing is controlled by Bahrain’s Mumtalakat, with CYVN holding a minority interest.

This is what Britain increasingly means when it describes a company as a national success story: the workers, factory and history are here, while the capital, strategic control and future returns belong elsewhere.

McLaren may now be recovering

This story does not end with a shuttered factory.

CYVN has committed more than $2 billion to rebuild and expand the automotive business. McLaren is planning to move beyond its narrow dependence on two-seat supercars, potentially including a high-performance SUV.

It has also announced a £450 million investment in Woking and plans expected to create as many as 1,000 jobs.

After years of retrenchment, that is significant.

An SUV may offend purists, but Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Bentley, Porsche and Rolls-Royce have all discovered the commercial power of high-performance luxury vehicles with more seats and greater everyday usefulness.

McLaren may finally acquire the broader product range required to support its supercars.

But the money enabling that recovery is coming from Abu Dhabi.

Foreign ownership may be the reason McLaren loses part of its claim to being a British-owned success story. It may also be the reason McLaren survives as a British manufacturer at all.