"At present, after the re-integration of Cosworth, our engine production has one production plant in England and one in America. If the sales of our joint venture brand in China are satisfactory, we will consider setting up a new production plant in China."
This time, Barron came to the North American headquarters of Cosworth in Michigan. As part of their acquisition agreement with Ford and Volkswagen Group, British Motor Group acquired the Cosworth Engine Company, which had been split into two. This will be the main platform for British Motor Group's future automotive engines.
In fact, Cosworth is also a British automobile engine manufacturing brand. The company was originally founded by Mike Haidongqing and Keith Duckworth in 1958 as a British racing internal combustion engine manufacturer. In the early days of the company, the staff were all former employees and employees of Lotus Engine Co., Ltd.
However, the company changed hands many times afterwards. In 1998, as an accessory to the Volkswagen Group's acquisition of Rolls-Royce, Cosworth also became part of Volkswagen.
But just a few months later, Volkswagen split Cosworth into two, and sold its racing engine division to Ford Motor Company, which used it as a research and development department for high-performance engines and supplied engines to the Jaguar F1 team.
Five years later, at the end of 2004, Ford announced that Jaguar would withdraw from F1, and Cosworth once again faced the fate of being resold. As a result, the F1 team was sold to Red Bull, and Cosworth Racing Engine Company was also resold to Champ Car series owners Kevin Calkovic and Gerard Foster.
However, the Red Bull Racing team later announced that it would no longer use Cosworth engines in the 2006 season. Subsequently, many teams also changed their engine manufacturers, most of which switched to Ferrari and Toyota engine platforms. As a result, Cosworth's racing engine production company faced a crisis.
At this time, after successfully acquiring Ford's three British car brands, the Caesar Fund bought Cosworth Racing Engine Company from Kevin Calkewen and Gerard Foster for less than $100 million.
After acquiring Cosworth Engine Company, Audi, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, split Cosworth into two. Its civilian car engine production and manufacturing department was renamed Cosworth Technology, and the racing engine department bought back by Ford was called Cosworth Racing.
But both companies retain the historic name "Cosworth".
It is worth mentioning that at that time Audi only needed the factory's rich engine research and development technology, so in the agreement with Ford at the time, Cosworth Technology, with an annual turnover of 250 million US dollars, did not have the right to authorize the "Cosworth" trademark for profit-making purposes.
The Cosworth Technology engine team has made significant contributions to Audi, most notably the 4.2-liter V8 engine used in the Audi S4, Audi S6 and Audi A8. When used in the S6, it had a power output of only 340 horsepower, but once the Cosworth team took over and replaced it with two KKK low-boost (0.8 bar) turbochargers, power immediately soared to 450 horsepower (for the RS6 model), and maximum torque (413 lbft) was reached at only 1950 rpm, continuing all the way to 5600 rpm.
Cosworth's skills can also be seen in the variable intake manifold - the S6's V8 engine is still equipped with a two-stage variable intake manifold, but the RS6 does not need it at all.
Although the strength of Cosworth Technology's engine plant is impeccable, Audi was forced to decide to give it up due to practical considerations. Another reason is that Cosworth Technology, which employs more than 1,000 people, is located far away in Northamptonshire, England (there is also a production center in North America), which is far away from Audi's German headquarters.
Therefore, Cosworth Technology was also bought from Volkswagen Group as part of the Kaiser Fund's acquisition of Bentley.
After the establishment of the British Motor Group, they once again merged Cosworth Technology and Cosworth Racing to become the group's wholly-owned subsidiary, Cosworth Engine Company, to provide power systems for their future products.
In addition, Aston Martin, a subsidiary of the British Automobile Group, also has plans to return to the F1 arena. The last time the Aston Martin team appeared in the F1 arena was in the middle of the last century.
In 1959, after winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the World GT Sportscar Championship, the Aston Martin team withdrew from the Formula One racing arena.
The main reason is to participate in F1 events, which is too expensive. With Aston Martin's strength, it is impossible to survive in the F1 field without the support of a wealthy group.
However, the British Motor Group now needs to rebuild the image and popularity of its brands. For a brand like Aston Martin that mainly produces supercars, appearing in top events such as F1 is still very important for its brand image - if you haven't gained a good name in F1, or even appeared in it, how can you make people have the confidence to buy your high-performance sports car?
In addition, the F1 event itself is controlled by Barron. The Pioneer Sports Group he owns holds 90% of the shares of the F1 Group. You know, the timing is very important for a new team to enter the F1 competition. The most ideal situation is to enter when the F1 rules are overhauled every 5-6 years, especially when the power unit rules are significantly changed.
Otherwise, even if the new team enters the track, it will only be left with dust.
Because usually, one year of use of the power unit can bring about a 40-60 horsepower increase in the second year. These horsepower advantages are enough to make up for the gap in aerodynamics!
If a brand spends a lot of money to enter F1 and gets lapped in every race, how can they sell their civilian cars?
Aston Martin has a very good opportunity now. It has an annual R&D investment budget of more than 100 million pounds from the British Motor Group, and the F1 event is preparing to make rule changes next year. Therefore, in 2007, the Aston Martin team will appear on the F1 field to promote their upcoming new supercars and SUVs.
In addition, Bentley currently uses the W12 engine from the Volkswagen Group, but it is impossible for the British Automobile Group to always let the engine of its top luxury car brand be in the hands of others.
Therefore, in addition to continuing to improve their V8 engine, Cosworth will also continue to promote the development of its own V12 engine.
As for production, the British Motor Group currently has a total of six factories for vehicle production, five of which are in the UK. They are two factories of Bentley (Crewe factory and Wolfsburg factory in Germany); one factory of Aston Martin, located in Warwick factory in England; two factories of Land Rover, namely Solihull factory and Halewood factory; and one factory of Jaguar in Birmingham.
The plan for the British Motor Group is to build new factories overseas, with Austria, Poland and Brazil all being candidates, as well as a joint venture factory in China.
The production capacity in Britain will be gradually merged, and the production of the two super luxury car brands Bentley and Aston Martin will be mainly retained. As for Jaguar and Land Rover, the production capacity will be gradually moved abroad, which is also to control the production cost of the whole vehicle.
In terms of joint venture factories, in addition to Nanjing Automobile's original production base, Nanjing Yingqi Group has also signed an agreement with Jiangsu Province to build a new joint venture production base in Kunshan, which will be used for the production of Jaguar, Land Rover brands and some Cosworth engines in the future.