Malcolm Wilson

NO MATTER HOW familiar you are with them, Malcolm Wilson’s achievements always seem extraordinary and more than worthy of his status as an Outstanding UK Leader in this year’s Autocar Awards.

This is a man who first established himself as an international rally champion – a difficult enough task, but he then did something far more difficult and enduringly significant. He used his contacts, ideas and quiet drive to start a motorsport business called M-sport, while refusing pointblank to move some 200 miles from his beloved home in the Lake District to Oxfordshire, which the rest of British motorsport calls home.

Wilson proceeded to make M-sport so efficient and successful that it attracted a string of prestigious clients. The first was Ford, whose WRC team he ran in the glory days of Colin Mcrae and Carlos Sainz. Today, Wilson still runs a team in the WRC, but in recent years he has also started building winning GT racers for Bentley (down the road in Crewe), Ford-based Hoonigan rallycross cars for Ken Block and a range of Fiesta rally cars for individual clients across the world.

A £19 million investment programme is under way, meaning M-sport will soon have large separate factories for preparing existing competition cars and building new ones, plus a 1.5-mile test circuit next door so technicians and clients can easily evaluate cars they’ve built or fixed. What’s important, as M-sport clients and employees readily agree, is that M-sport’s achievements so far are a direct result of Malcolm Wilson’s modest brand leadership. There is no telling how far it can go.