McLaren
McLaren sold 15% of its F1 team for £185 million in December 2020. By September 2025 that team sold in full for £3.5 billion. McLaren’s car company nearly went bankrupt five times getting there.
ALL BREAKDOWNSTHE BREAKDOWNFEATURE
9/24/20266 min read
McLaren sold 15% of its F1 team for £185 million in December 2020.
By September 2025 that team sold in full for £3.5 billion.
McLaren’s car company nearly went bankrupt five times getting there.
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THE SETUP
Two companies share one badge, that's where the similarities end.
In December 2020, McLaren sold 15% of its F1 team to MSP Sports Capital for £185 million, valuing McLaren Racing at £560 million. By September 2025 the whole team was bought out at roughly £3.5 billion.
Over that same stretch, McLaren Automotive, the road car business, needed rescuing five times just to stay afloat.
It took a £150 million emergency loan in July 2020, then cut 1,200 jobs that same year. In 2021 it raised another £550 million in fresh equity.
In 2022 it needed cash again, the same year the market started pricing in real doubt that McLaren would ever pay back everything it had borrowed.
Then in 2023 it needed £450 million more, the same year it lost £1 billion on revenue that had fallen 25%.
By March 2024, Mumtalakat, McLaren's majority owner for years, bought out its last remaining minority shareholders to take full control.
Nine months later, Mumtalakat sold the whole business to Abu Dhabi's CYVN Holdings.
In comparison, Ferrari sold 13,663 cars in 2023 and kept €1.2 billion as profit, a 21.1% net margin.
One decision in December 2020 split these two businesses apart. The playbook explains why Racing became six times more valuable and why Automotive needed five bailouts to survive.
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THE PLAYBOOK
1. The stake sale
Ron Dennis founded McLaren Automotive in 2010, chasing Ferrari's prestige with a low volume, engineering-led supercar. Six years later his own shareholders, Bahrain's Mumtalakat and TAG Group's Mansour Ojjeh, forced him out, after he brought them an unwanted $2 billion Chinese takeover offer they hadn't asked for.
By December 2020, that decade had produced a car business surviving on emergency loans. Instead of raising more cash against Automotive directly, McLaren sold 15% of its F1 team to MSP Sports Capital for £185 million.
Racing wasn't short of money. It was the cleanest, most valuable asset the group had and selling a piece of it let McLaren raise cash without Automotive's own liabilities coming into the deal.
Over the following year the group mortgaged its Woking headquarters in a sale and leaseback, sold its technology division for no cash at all and carved Racing into its own entity with its own capital structure.
That protected Racing's investors from Automotive's losses.
Three things created value for the racing business.
The 2021 cost cap put a $145 million ceiling on what any team could spend, which gave every team, including McLaren, a bounded downside for the first time.
Formula 1's audience grew underneath all ten teams at once, through Liberty Media's commercial push, Netflix's Drive to Survive and new races in Las Vegas and Miami.
Then, McLaren actually won: twenty-one months before its 2024 title, the team was last in the constructors' standings. Under Zak Brown, it climbed to champions by December 2024, its first title since 1998.
MSP had put in £185 million in 2020. When it sold out in September 2025, it walked away with roughly ten times that.
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Takeaway: Splitting a struggling business off from a valuable one protects the valuable one. It doesn't make it more valuable. McLaren's structure kept Racing safe from Automotive's losses, but Racing's price still had to drive its own growth.
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2. Ferrari sells a wait. McLaren sold a car.
Here is the easiest way to see McLaren's problem: walk into a Ferrari dealership and try to buy a new one. You can't. Ferrari's order book has run years ahead of production since at least 2023, dealers hold no sellable stock and roughly a fifth of Ferrari's revenue now comes from personalisation, buyers paying extra on top of an already sold car for paint, trim and carbon finishes.
Walk into a McLaren dealership and you can drive a new one home today.
In 2018 McLaren committed £1.2 billion to a plan called Track25: eighteen new models by 2025, a retail network expanded to 100 locations and production capacity nearly doubled to 6,000 cars a year, up from 3,300. By 2023 it was selling around 2,000.
All that development spending, all those showrooms, all that factory capacity, still had to be paid for and there were nowhere near enough cars moving through the pipeline to cover it.
The £1 billion loss in 2023 wasn't caused by one bad decision. McLaren had spent years building a cost base for sales volumes it never reached. Then a model changeover cut deliveries even further.
Ferrari doesn't have that problem, because Ferrari never tries to sell up to demand. It sells to a managed waiting list: no dealer stock sitting around losing value, no discount needed to move a car and a used market that holds up because supply never floods it.
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Takeaway: Fix your cost base first. You can't copy a scarcity strategy while your fixed costs still force you to chase volume.
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3. Whoever holds the equity picks the chief executive
Automotive has cycled through three chief executives since 2013: Mike Flewitt, then a nine month gap with nobody in the role at all, then Michael Leiters, now Nick Collins. Racing, insulated inside its own capital structure, kept Zak Brown as CEO from 2018, through years of poor track results as well as good ones.
The clearest link runs through Leiters. He was removed within weeks of CYVN completing its takeover of Automotive in April 2025, immediately replaced by Nick Collins, an executive from CYVN's own Forseven venture. In under three years Leiters launched the 750S, the Artura Spider and Coupe, shipped the Solus GT and revealed the W1 hypercar, McLaren's highest priced car to date. Four cars in three years didn't save his job once the owner changed.
What got him removed wasn't a car he built. It was a range, in Collins's own words afterwards, with "not enough differentiation": every McLaren still following the same two-seat, mid-engine formula.
A business that keeps needing bailouts isn't run by the people building the product anymore. It's run by the majority shareholder.
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Takeaway: If a business keeps needing rescuing, the people running it stop calling the shots. The people paying for the rescues do. Every bailout comes with someone else's opinion.
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ONE MORE THING
CYVN's fix for Automotive has three parts.
The first is the balance sheet. CYVN's takeover wiped out Automotive's existing debt and added roughly £1.5 billion of fresh capital, the first time in five years the company has had money without a repayment timetable.
The second is production: Collins cut 2025 output by a third, to around 2,000 cars, explicitly to rebuild exclusivity rather than chase volume.
The third is the range itself. Merging with the stealth start-up Forseven is meant to take McLaren beyond the two-seat supercar formula into new body styles entirely, the differentiation Collins says has been missing.
The first two parts are financial engineering. Removing debt and cutting output are things any new owner with enough capital can do in a single year and McLaren has now done both.
The third part is the one is interesting. A wider range only fixes the business if it creates something Ferrari has and McLaren doesn’t: cars people will wait years for, at prices McLaren doesn't need to discount.
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THE PAPER TRAIL
BBC Sport, "F1 'Spygate': Fifteen years on from the sporting scandal that had everything"
5 minute read
The BBC's retelling of the 780-page dossier, the suspicious photocopy shop owner and the record-breaking $100 million fine.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/63575321
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BBC Sport, "Ron Dennis: How broken friendship led to McLaren exit after 35 years as boss"
4 minute read
The collapse of a three-decade friendship between Ron Dennis and shareholder Mansour Ojjeh that ended one man's grip on the team he built.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/38000198
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DuPont Registry, "Secrets of Success: An Interview with McLaren F1 CEO Zak Brown"
6 minute read
Brown explains the turnaround from last place to champions.
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Harvard Business Review, "What Leaders Can Learn from a Formula 1 Turnaround"
6 minute read (podcast transcript)
Zak Brown on the toxic culture he inherited, unhappy sponsors, unhappy fans, unhappy drivers and how fixing trust, turned McLaren from last to first.
https://hbr.org/podcast/2025/12/what-leaders-can-learn-from-a-formula-1-turnaround
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