Exclusive Motorsport giants Mclaren and Tour winner Nibali team up to topple Sky
Formula One expertise to boost Bahrain-merida Team focus on winning grand tours with Nibali
Mclaren, one of the biggest names in motorsport, is to enter the world of professional cycling in an attempt to topple Team Sky, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
In a move which could shake up the sport, the Woking-based company will announce today at Bahrain-merida’s winter training camp in Hvar that it is entering into a joint-venture partnership with the team of 2014 Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali. Both entities are effectively Bahraini-owned, Mclaren by Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat, and Bahrain-merida by Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, one of the king’s sons.
The partnership, which is being described as “long-term”, will be with Mclaren’s Applied Technologies and Marketing and Commercial divisions – which accounts for almost 700 staff – making Bahrainmerida at a stroke one of the best funded, and certainly one of the best resourced, teams in the sport.
Team Sky lead the way in terms of World Tour team budgets and last year’s was around £35million. Yet that is paltry by Formula One standards. Mclaren’s racing programme costs upwards of £200 million a year. While the company will be putting only a fraction of that amount into this project in terms of hard cash – it would not discuss budgets beyond saying “there is no free ride” and its “commitment would match the team’s ambition to be the best” – even the use of its state-of-the-art facilities in Woking, including wind tunnel, plus access to Applied Technologies’ intellectual property, gives Bahrain-merida the sort of backing of which other teams can only dream.
The Telegraph understands that an equity structure is being drawn up, making Mclaren “50-50 joint venture partners”, while a special project team, led by Applied Technologies’ health and human performance director Duncan Bradley, will spend the first half of 2019 working with Bahrain-merida to pinpoint areas where Mclaren can have the biggest impact.
It will not be Mclaren’s first foray into cycling by any means. Applied Technologies signed a deal with UK Sport in 2009, working with both Team Sky and British Cycling in the build-up to London 2012. More recently, Mclaren worked with the American manufacturer Specialised to produce the S-works+mclaren Venge bike which Mark Cavendish used to win the green jersey at the 2011 Tour de France and that year’s world road race in Copenhagen.
It was Cavendish’s long-standing relationship with Mclaren that was behind the rumour this year that the Manx rider might move to Bahallert rain-merida, bringing Mclaren with him as a sponsor. In the end, he stayed with Dimension Data.
John Allert, Mclaren’s chief marketing officer and one of the driving forces behind the venture, denied that a move for Cavendish had ever been on the cards, with the team focused on winning grand tours with Nibali. “Mark has been a personal friend and a friend of this team going back almost a decade,” Allert said. “This is a team focused on GC [general classification]. Mark is focused on stage wins.”
Allert denied that reservations about how the team might be received were behind the decision not to carry the Mclaren name initially. “The name of the team in 2019 is already set as Bahrain-merida,” he said. “We’re proud of the association. And I think there is certainly the possibility of the name Mclaren being part of the team in the future in some way.”
did admit that the sport’s historic doping issues, and the potential that the brand might be embroiled in a scandal, had been a concern when weighing up the partnership. But he said Mclaren had done “a significant amount of due diligence”, including meeting with the world governing body.
“I think they [the UCI, cycling’s world governing body] have actually gone further than cleaning up the sport,” Allert said. “It is probably the most stringently regulated sport on earth. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed, so we’ve had to come into this with our eyes wide open.
“But we’ve discussed it at length with our partners, with the governing body, we’ve done our due diligence and I can tell you, if we weren’t 100 per cent satisfied, we wouldn’t be involved.
“The parallels with F1 are so obvious and so many,” he said. “From the combination of athlete-machine to the use of aerodynamics, engineering, material science, the interplay of rubber compounds on road surfaces, fatigue management, recovery, fuelling and hydration of the body under extreme conditions … these are all things we are very used to in F1.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that you can just immediately come into cycling and apply exactly the same philosophies. But the basic knowledge we’ve built up, and the degree of science underpinning that knowledge, is probably at a more advanced level in F1 simply because the margins are so much smaller than they are in cycling. And that arms race is so much better funded in pursuit of those margins.”
Brent Copeland, the South African general manager of Bahrainmerida, described Mclaren’s entry into the sport as “the most exciting development in cycling in the last decade”, adding that comparisons with Team Sky were “inevitable”.
“At the moment, the best team are Team Sky so it’s inevitable that people are going to say ‘This is going to be a competition with Sky’.
“Sky are British, Mclaren are British. So, there will be a lot of talk of that. But that’s not our objective. Our objective is to keep it international, and to become the best.”