VICE VERSION
Seat’s vice president has a clear vision of where Cupra is heading. Mike Duff steals a few moments of his time
THE R8 DIDN’T COME FROM SOMETHING AUDI HAD DONE BEFORE. WE WILL NEED TO LOOK AT PRODUCTS LIKE THAT
Seat is enormously proud of its Spanishness, but you’ll find little of the sort of horizontally reposed hasta mañana stereotype that you might expect to be in evidence at the vast Martorell plant. Trucks bringing in fresh parts are queuing out of the gates and acres of freshly built cars sit in orderly rows waiting for onward delivery. Inside the towering glass and steel office block that serves as corporate HQ and sits at one edge of the plant is the bustle and sense of purpose that comes from people trying to fit too much work into too little time. From the sixth floor, where the most senior executives hang out, the view over both the factory and a distant range of mountains is spectacular, but few seem to get the chance to enjoy it.
Wayne Griffiths, one of Seat’s biggest beasts, exemplifies the get-things-done spirit of the place, with a crushing handshake and wolfish smile that suggest limited patience for things that bore him. Our interview is squeezed between other commitments, one of the hovering pack of assistants warning there’s just half an hour before the next Very Important Meeting. The implicit suggestion is we don’t have time for small talk.
Yet while there’s lots of ground to cover, the obvious question demands to be asked first: how did a Brit end up as vice president of the Volkswagen Group’s Spanish subsidiary?
“I grew up near Manchester and went to school there,” says Griffiths, his northern accent still obvious but muddied by time spent in many other places. “My dad was a car dealer and I grew up in the business – washing cars, repairing cars, all the usual.”
But while the car industry already had its hooks in him, Griffiths’ ambitions ran higher. He did a degree in business and German at Leeds, a course which included a placement with Audi. He’d also been working as a salesman for the family firm during the holidays – something I sense he must have been pretty good at – giving him a choice to make when his degree finished. “Did I want to go back to the family business or do my own thing?” Griffiths says. “My father wanted me back but I wanted to see the world, so I decided to go back to Germany.”
It was the right call. Griffiths started working for Audi and was soon on the executive fast track, rising to become head of sales for the brand in Germany. But when his then-boss Luca de Meo announced he was moving to become Seat’s president and offered Griffiths the chance to come with him, he didn’t think twice.
“I’d already been here in 1991 and ’92 and I loved the place,” he says, “I spoke Spanish and had links here – my partner was Spanish – so when the opportunity came I jumped at it.”
Two years on, and with Seat’s sales booming amid an industry downturn – the brand’s volumes are up 20% this year – that looks to have been a smart play. Griffiths admits that the chance to launch Cupra as a brand was part of the appeal, but why does it need to be a separate entity to the Seat mothership? “Look at Audi, Mercedes or BMW and they have sporty sub-brands, but specialist brands within the brand,” he says. “We thought that with Cupra it made more sense to create a separate brand and not leave it below the Seat brand. I often get asked ‘why not a sub-brand?’ It would help Seat, obviously it would, but it would also be a limitation. By creating a new brand we could do something new, something others haven’t done until now, with a target group we believe exists beneath the premium segment.”
Griffiths admits that – as you might expect – money plays a part as well, with the view being that Cupra will be able to play in a different part of the market, something a subbrand relationship would blur. “With Cupra we’re looking at cars between £26,000 and
£44,000,” he says. “Seat ranges from around £13,000 to £22,000 classically, so we’re going to be in a totally different segment.”
He also says the separation is vital to ensure Cupra products get the attention they will need to succeed. “One of the main reasons is from an organisational point of view, to get the full focus on it and not just the ‘if we have time to do it at the end of the day’ thinking where you do Cupra once everything else has been finished,” he explains. “We want Cupra to be the best it can be. Of course, for that to work buyers are going to have to agree that Cupra models offer a substantive difference over the Seats that, for the most part, will share the same core architecture.
“The gap is certainly big enough in terms of power. Look at where a standard Leon stops and where the Leon Cupra starts: 187bhp and 286bhp. There’s a 99bhp difference between them. The bigger challenge will be in terms of design differentiation, the best we can do in terms of sophistication, uniqueness and individuality as well as performance.”
To that you can add exclusivity – Griffiths admits we can expect to see Cupra versions of significant new models sold before their Seat sisters go on sale – and, ultimately, the desire to offer Cupra-only products.
“I can certainly imagine in the first phase a car offered exclusively as a Cupra,” he says. “I think that will happen before a pure Cupra product. But at some point Cupra will need a car that is iconic. The R8 didn’t come from something that Audi had done before, it came directly from Quattro Gmbh. We will need to look at products like that as well for Cupra.”
There’s no shortage of ambition, then. Turning Cupra into a separate brand also gives the chance to create a hierarchy within its own model line-ups. There have been R versions of the Leon Cupra, but Griffith says we can expect more exotic versions of Cupras to become a regular thing. “It’s something that’s in the plan, he says. “With all Cupra models we’re planning a halo model, a limited-edition version of the Cupra, we’re looking at that with all the models that come, and we’ll be able to do that.
The upshot is that there will be many more Cupra models and much higher volumes as the family expands. “We have big objectives for Cupra, we want to get to 10% of Seat sales, which would mean something like 50,000 cars a year. With the right product portfolio I think we can achieve that,” he says.
Griffiths is clearly happy that Cupra is already developing its own buzz. “We noticed this morning that the fan club has already seen that we’ve gone online with the Ateca configurator and started to talk about it,” he says. “It was great that they picked up on it so quickly because we haven’t even made any announcement about it yet. We’ve got people out there following what we’re doing, there’s a huge amount of excitement.”
Griffiths talks about Cupra having a tribal appeal, one that comes not only from existing owners but also from those who like the idea of becoming part of a more exclusive club. “If we’re going to succeed then obviously we need to conquest new customers, but we also need to keep that tribe, that fan base,” he says. “It’s out there and we’re listening to it.”
He is doing his own part, too, showing off a carbonfibre bracelet carrying Cupra’s slightly lupine triangular logo. “People ask what it is,” he says. “Of course, I love to tell them.”
With that, our brief time is up, the assistants are back and Griffiths is being ushered towards his next meeting, the language switching from English to Spanish as he orders a final pause. Somewhere close by is another room full of waiting executives, but Griffiths is still keen to show me one last thing: pictures of his Jaguar E-type, a 1966 roadster to match the year of his birth and proof that, while the brand might be new, there are proper car guys at the top of it.