After Renault, McLaren and Aston Martin are now on the verge of collapse
F1 News
- GPblog.com
After major financial worries at Renault, there are now also noises from McLaren and Aston Martin that don't sound too positive. The British brands lack government support and are now in dire straits.
McLaren in trouble
The AD wrote Saturday morning that McLaren announced that it needs no less than 280 million euros to get out of the corona crisis. The umbrella brand of the Formula 1 team not only misses out on F1 revenues, but sales of the sports cars have also dropped a lot since the corona virus.
McLaren's plan was to borrow the historic Formula 1 cars and its own head office, but the make has now returned from that. The bondholders announced that this had already been done in 2017, when they had to buy out the contract of then team boss and shareholder Ron Dennis.
Aston Martin also hit
Data from the Financial Times would also show that the production of McLaren's sports cars has been at a standstill since March and that they wanted to start again in April. Whether that has already happened is still unclear. Earlier, McLaren had already lost government support and shareholders had already put £300 million into the company out of their own pockets. Yet that is not enough and McLaren needs more.
McLaren is not the only British motorsport brand that suffers from the crisis, because Aston Martin is also in dire straits due to the corona crisis. The brand didn't have an easy time of it already and had a lot of hope for the first SUV, to help it get back on its feet with Lawrence Stroll's investment. Whether that will succeed, is still very much to be seen.