60 years since its foundation, what is Cosworth’s market offering today?

“Cosworth brings decades of motorsport expertise to the efficiency and effectiveness of advanced powertrain and electronics systems to today’s road cars, and the road cars of the future. We have independently verified growth opportunities in the hybrid powertrain market. Our light-weighting, combustion chamber design, and thermal efficiency capabilities are aligned with the needs of internal combustion engines for hybrid vehicles. There is tremendous growth opportunity in that market, as we also develop technologies in parallel for the electrification of vehicles.”

What have been the driving factors for the company’s evolution in recent years?

“The increase in silicon and software in cars has been one factor. Every day there is more silicon, more software and more sensors in road cars, which is one of our areas of expertise. Our products and solutions, initially developed on race cars, are now successfully applied to road cars in volumes of hundreds of thousandths of units. Increasingly, we are developing – and in some cases manufacturing – high efficiency engines for hybrid powertrains as well.”

Talk us through the benefits of Cosworth’s investment into new facilities…

“On the powertrain side of the business, vertical integration supports our unparalleled speed to market. We can go from a concept to running a clean sheet engine design on a dyno in twelve months or less. We believe our ability to utilise concurrent engineering platforms enhances our speed to market, which in turns helps our customers be very effective. As we look at further improvements in this area, our attention turns to increased complexity of design, geometry of engine components, increasing throughout, lowering emissions, higher efficiencies. We are able to add value by investing in infrastructure, improving speed to market and by cost effectively manufacturing increasingly complex components and engines.”

Cosworth has recently opened its North American headquarters. How does the company unify its presence in the UK and US?

“Our strategy for organic growth includes globalisation and regionalisation. To capitalise on opportunities in regions of the world that are driven by automotive technology and production, you have to have a physical presence. We now have our UK operations, a North American headquarters and we will, in due course, establish an Asian presence to serve that region of the world. That is going to be a significant contributor to our organic growth.”

What are Cosworth’s strengths and USPs?

“The speed to market mentioned before is definitely one. I think we have a unique combination of technical expertise across electronic and powertrain divisions that are aligned to changes in the automotive market. If you look at electrification, automation, hybridisation, our technical capabilities are perfectly aligned with those increasing needs in the automotive sector. We now dedicate the majority of our resources towards those applications, meeting or exceeding our customers’ requirements in those areas.”

What would you say are Cosworth’s flagship projects currently?

“We are developing intellectual properties for advanced driver and autonomous vehicle requirements. We continue to promote our AliveDrive platform, which as evidenced by the Google AutoTrends Report 2018, has tremendous growth potential. In it, they talked about how, globally, the search for on-board camera systems and integration with social media actually exceeds search for advanced driver assistance systems. We have a patented platform for camera imaging, object detection and light detection that is ideally suited to capitalise on growth opportunities like that. On the powertrain side of the business, it is communicating the value stream that we have from concept to full production in which more and more OEMs find value.”

How does Cosworth use 60 years of heritage to establish and grow relationships with manufacturers?

“Cosworth’s history reinforces our credibility and our technical expertise. Recent success has come from building trust with the OEMs who trust us with challenging applications and integration of our technology into vehicles. We are increasing the awareness of the products and services we are offering OEMs, and they in turn are entrusting us with more of their business.”