Talk:Tom Walkinshaw Racing

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[edit] TWR/MG Rover Collaboration

The reason as to why the TWR/MG Rover Collaboration collapsed is NOT because MGR couldn't pay the bills. The real reason was because the that the racing arm of TWR was performing poorly in Formula 1, and the company were making major losses. In fact MGR were paying the bills on time, but TWR was shifting the money it was making from the car developments side to the racing side. Eventually the losses were amounting to so much that they couldn't even pay their basic fixed costs.

The company went bust and with it, liquidators took the RDX60 project with them. TWR owned the intellectual property rights for the new car. As far as I know, MGR spent a budget of £300 million and the project had almost passed the digital mock-up stage. Indeed, many parts manufacturers were already producing parts for the prototype for the new body. Had it have got past this stage the RDX60 would be in existance today in full production form. £100 million had to be paid to liquidators to get back the design development data that the company needed to continue to develop the products in house.

Some guys at the MGR Product Design Centre said that the decision to get TWR to control the design development was a bad idea as they felt that the whole system was inefficient, and they believed that they could have done a better job if everything had been done under one studio. Ultimately, the downfall of TWR led to the unravelling of the RDX60 plan to produce a decent replacement to the MG ZS/Rover 45 models. As we now all know, other poor management decision culminated into what we now know today, but the ultimate one was to hand development to TWR.