Caterham boss: "Autonomous and electric cars are an opportunity"

Macdonald, unusual for his equal love of figures and cars, had just arrived as financial director. “Those were tough times,” he recalls. “First there was the complication of changing from Rover engines to Ford, and then our chassis builder went bust. We’d moved to a new supplier in Westbury, Wiltshire, with the aim of saving money and scaling up from 10 to 15 chassis a week.

“The supplier bought expensive equipment for the job, but it didn’t earn its keep and the costs sent them over the edge. We bought their business and convinced the bank to sell the new equipment. These days we have 20 people in Westbury handjigging and hand-welding chassis from laser-cut components we buy in from suppliers. It works fine.”

By 2009 Corvin wanted to sell and eventually found Tony Fernandes, a Malaysian-based entrepreneur known for his rapid expansion of budget airline Air Asia. Within weeks Fernandes (who had wanted Lotus but been frustrated) announced aggressive plans to expand Caterham’s horizons far beyond anything Nearn or anyone else could have conceived.

He rapidly acquired the former Team Lotus (rebadged Caterham F1) and established a Caterham Technology and Innovation (CTI) centre in Hingham, Norfolk.

He also agreed a joint venture with Renault to produce moderndesign Caterhams that would share key components and be sold around the world in partnership with Renault’s revived Alpine range.

They were bold plans that looked risky from the start, and it hardly helped that by 2012 Caterham’s two principals, Ali and Edwards, had departed to start their own venture, later revealed as the Norfolk-based Zenos sports car company. That left Macdonald holding a particularly lively and troublesome baby – at which stage his role was upgraded to that of CEO.

Macdonald tried to improve things at Kennet Road, and there was plenty to do. “There were no financial controls,” he says, “and although, like now, every Seven was built to order, nobody really knew how long it took to build one. We also had problems with wastage and supplier shortages. Cars were always getting held up because bits didn’t arrive.”

However, bigger stuff was happening at CTI in Hingham, and with the F1 team, very little of which was good news. By early 2014 the Renault joint venture had “concluded” and the F1 team was losing “millions a month”. Both needed winding up and Macdonald, now appointed group CEO, was put in charge of the tasks. Macdonald began a period of frenetic world travel to meetings with owner Fernandes, whose airline was by now encountering its own challenges.

The F1 team went to Colin Kolles in June 2014 and CTI finally closed its doors in February 2015, with most of its 100 engineers going to Jaguar Land Rover, McLaren or Lotus – although not before they’d done some preliminary engineering on the Suzuki-engined Caterham Seven 160, the £16,995 entry-level car that has since become a big success. When things began to calm down, Macdonald went straight back to his base in Kennet Road and swears he was glad to do so.

When you meet him in his unprepossessing office, you can instantly see how perfect Macdonald must have seemed to Fernandes for the difficult job that needed doing. Here was a fully trained accountant, a natural-born optimist who’d already worked in big industry but who had also grown up with a car enthusiast father and spent much time as a teenager mending his MG Midget and Triumph Spitfire.

Macdonald swears he has grown to love Caterham and its cars as much as the customers do, to the extent of spending his own money on them. He has a personal 620S and this year will scratch a longfelt itch by joining owners at the 2017 Caterham Academy, racing a car he has just finished building with his own hands from a kit. The programme will be fun, he expects, but it will also give him fresh insight into customers’ needs.

Talking business, Caterham is very much back on the rails. It already holds more than 600 forward orders, which means every 2017 car already has a name against it. The 60-off batch of retro-styled, Suzuki-engined Sprint models, announced at last summer’s Goodwood Revival, sold out in a week, and UK sales growth has been “tremendous”.

Macdonald, who admits that at times his instinct for good sense blunted Fernandes’s ambition, is very much the captain of the ship now and is doing things his way. The company has just replaced its old-style production line with a ‘cell’ assembly system.