Mister Mac

THE BOSS OF McLAREN ON ADDING A V6 PHEV, SURVIVING GLOBAL PANDEMICS, AND NOT BUILDING AN SUV

- BRUCE NEWTON

PICTURE IN your mind’s eye the boss of a supercar company. Razor thin, perfect hair, tanned a leathery Monaco brown, poised in a perfectly cut Zegna business suit. Luca di Montezemolo, the legendary leader of Ferrari, is the archetype. Or the implausibly fashionable Stephan Winkelmann, who ran Lamborghini and is now at Bugatti.

But McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt is an entirely different proposition; a ruddyfaced, wispy-haired Liverpudlian who began his working life building Ford Escorts on the Halewood assembly line in the early 1980s. He seems a more jeans and tees kind of guy.

“That’s a little bit where I still am,” Flewitt tells Wheels.

Just a little bit, though. By the time he was wooed away to McLaren Automotive in 2012, just two years after it had been established, Flewitt was a Ford corporate officer overseeing all of its European manufacturing.

“I’ve still got my production report from my last day at Ford Motor Company,” he reveals. “We built 8700 cars that day in the 23 factories I ran. At McLaren we build 20 a day.

“I didn’t know any Ford customers. The only way I met a Ford customer was if I went to the pub and the bloke next me said, ‘I’ve got a Ford Focus.’

“At McLaren, in contrast, I know lots of customers; they all have my email address, they all write to me, they talk to me, we spend time at events.”