Monday Mystery: Caterham CEO Graham Macdonald on life after F1 and the Renault joint venture

Of course, Tony Fernandes had hugely ambitious plans for the Caterham brand and, when he bought the company in 2011, we entered a very exciting period of change in Caterham’s history, which included our entry into Formula 1, exploratory journeys into new sectors and the intriguing opportunity to develop Caterham’s first brand new, mainstream sportscar.

We entered into a 50:50 joint venture partnership with Renault to work with its equally famous Alpine sportscar brand, with the planned outcome that both brands would develop new cars. We would take advantage of Renault’s mass manufacturing capability; Alpine would benefit from our expertise in niche, lightweight vehicles and our agility as a low-volume company.

Most people know that the plan didn’t quite work out as we hoped. Ultimately, that came down to money, as most of these things do. I’m sure the nay-sayers thought that little Caterham wouldn’t mount a realistic effort but, be assured, this was a very serious endeavour to which Caterham and its shareholders were fully committed. That can be evidenced by the equally serious investment that was put behind the venture – not least the €20 million with which we bought half of the Dieppe factory that would have built the car. If further investment into the company – which was again in the tens of millions – had come to fruition, that car would be on the road today.

I think very few people realise quite how mouth-wateringly close the first ever mainstream Caterham came to being a reality.

We were within weeks, not months, of tooling up and being able to start marketing the vehicle, codenamed C120. The clay and foam models of the car now live in our Dartford factory as tantalising glimpses of what might have been.

Ultimately, Caterham’s brief sojourn into the world of F1 also faded – I don’t look back on that with any regret because, although the sale of the F1 team and the dissolution of the JV with Renault in 2014 left us with some unforeseen challenges, F1 gave us a global marketing platform for Caterham that simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

And C120 may be something that lives again. Caterham owns all of the IP around the design and development of the car. If another partner were to be found, the project could yet see the light of day.

But for now and, since the period during which F1 and the JV left the Caterham stable again, we have been putting our focus back into what we do best – building, developing and honing the Seven.

We’ve never stopped continually refining the Seven and a recent development as part of our motorsport programme has revealed something that we genuinely think could result in the ultimate Seven product. The engineering guys are positively giddy about this and we’ll be unleashing it upon the world very soon.

Our order book for the Seven remains plump and full, stretching all the way to Spring 2017; the enduring quality and popularity of our core product means that there’s still plenty to get excited about at Caterham.