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Cosworth
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cosworth
Current holder of the ‘Manufacturer of the Year’ title, Cosworth is the F1 superstar that diversified its high-performance engine and electronics capabilities into fresh areas with outstanding success. Group Head of Marketing Pio Szyjanowicz talks to European Outlook about its first-past-the-post strategies and delivery. By Colin Chinery
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osworth is a motorsport legend; 176 Grand Prix victories and second only to Ferrari as the most successful F1 engine constructor of all time. Its all-conquering heyday was the ‘seventies when it resourced practically every car on the starting grid – notably Lotus and McLaren - and powering among others, Emerson Fittipaldi, Jackie Stewart, James Hunt and Nelson Pique to victory. Then six years ago it moved away from its F1 focus, switching lanes with new strategies, products and markets. It was a masterstroke of re-direction, combining Cosworth’s celebrated intellectual property in high-performance engines and electronics with a rapid end-to-end engineering and manufacturing strategy. Now across aerospace, automotive, defence and marine sport – in Britain and in export markets like the USA, Russia and India - the Northampton-headquartered company continues in the position it knows best; as polesitter, doubling its turnover and winning universal accolades. Among the latest, The Manufacturer magazine’s prestigious ‘Manufacturer of the Year’ award recognising a remarkable transition from motorsport superstar to a diversified business with a high value-added manufacturing capability competing with the best. The original Cosworth engineering business, founded in 1958 by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth, continued in private hands until the 1980s when it went through two changes of ownership, moving ultimately into the hands of the Ford Motor Company where for six years it was part of Ford’s Premier Performance Division. It was to be a defining relationship, bringing together the mechanics and electronic sides of the business in the same group. When Ford disengaged from F1 and its motor sports association in 2004, the Cosworth Group as it is today, was formed, its new owners, as now, Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerald Forsythe. “Our capability and experience over the 40 to 50 years of producing F1 engines has allowed us to figure out how we can take these technologies and apply them 3
into other spaces,” says Cosworth Group’s Head of Marketing Pio Szyjanowicz. “Our diversification began some six years ago as the Group moved out of Ford’s hands. We were in the position of being solely dependent on one customer – F1 - and we recognised we needed to spread our operations across counter-cyclical markets. “We took a long hard look to see what differentiated us from other engineering firms.” One of the areas targeted was unmanned aerial vehicles – often called drones. UAV’s have two main requirements: airframe performance - achieving the power to get airborne - and a once up optimum engine/ fuel efficiency. But there was a problem of scale. Almost all UAVs employ very small petrol engines such as found in a grass cutter, adequate for early demonstrations of proof. At the same time the military across NATO were moving towards a common fuel policy where every single platform from aircraft to UAVs uses the same sort of fuel – to reduce cost, complexity and risk. However the early UAV versions were designed to run on gasoline – petrol - and it
“The combined traction in these four markets in that year produced that significant growth in revenues and profitability”
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was thought to be almost impossible to produce an engine sufficiently small and efficient that runs on diesel – which is what is meant by heavy fuel. “This is one of the areas where we at Cosworth have had some considerable success. Rather than converting a gasoline engine to run on diesel and keeping it small and light - I’m talking about something you can hold in one hand and weighs about 3 kilos and produces about three HP – we took a blank sheet design to create a heavy fuel engine at minimum possible weight and maximum possible power density. “And this allowed us to produce a compression ignition engine (most diesels combust on their own without a spark mechanism). If you can get this to work it’s extremely efficient, with relatively little fuel being needed to produce the power. But it’s very difficult to get it to work in very small volumes. And what we have been able to do is produce them with a technology - on which we hold a patent - that enables us to produce a genuine compression ignition heavy fuel engine of the ‘hold in your hand 3 HP’ kind that’s extremely economical compared with the others in the field that use spark plugs.”
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UAVs says Szyjanowicz, are only the tip of the iceberg. “The platforms we see and hear about are a very small part of what is being planned. Unmanned aerial vehicles are likely to become the mainstay of combat technology in the air, and our technology scales from 3HP all the way to 60HP and probably on to 200HP. It means you can within reason, produce an engine that will support any size platform. “But more interesting than that is that the same sorts of unmanned technologies are being investigated for marine work and unmanned ground vehicles –UGVs – and the technology we’ve developed can be directly used to power these sorts of vehicles. “And then there’s a considerable demand for electric power particularly in defence.. And the amount of electric power required for that is increasing enormously, so much so that the traditional alternator on many military vehicles cannot cope with supplying the amount of power soldiers need for their kit. We are seeing a significant interest at the moment in our technology that can
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provide auxiliary generators, carried either by one or two men or attached to a vehicle.” In 2010 Cosworth increased its turnover by almost 50 percent, a demonstration says Szyjanowicz of what the company can offer not only to mainstream automotive and premium brands such as Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover, but also the aerospace and defence sectors and the marine area of sport. “The combined traction in these four markets in that year produced that significant growth in revenues and profitability.” The recent ‘National Security Through Technology’ White Paper outlining a £150 billion defence projects spend over the next 10-years, reveals that British companies will no longer have priority over foreign firms when buying equipment and weapons for the military. 6
“Developments such as the Queen Elizabeth Engineering Award £1m prize - to be awarded for exceptional advances in engineering - and success stories like Cosworth, and being recognised by peer panels like the Manufacturer of the Year Award, shows that the industry is there”
Szyjanowicz however is untroubled. ”We wouldn’t expect to be given an unfair advantage based solely on where we are located. We would expect to be chosen on our merits, on the technology and capability of our products and services - the best in the world. I think Cosworth is a superb example of how to create competitive advantage, not just in what we offer but also in being able to deliver extremely quickly compared with some of the classical defence supply chain. It’s in the culture of our business. “But I think politicians are slowly coming round to seeing what they actually have in British industry. Developments such as the Queen Elizabeth Engineering Award £1m prize - to be awarded for exceptional advances in engineering
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- and success stories like Cosworth, and being recognised by peer panels like the Manufacturer of the Year Award, shows that the industry is there. And questions are now being raised about what is there in the economy that goes unrecognised. “We are more than willing to try and help politicians understand just how much manufacturing is contributing to the value of the economy. And if the likes of Mr Cameron, Mr Cable and Mr Clegg did the tour of what British manufacturing is doing, then our door is absolutely open to them any time of the day.” With three sites in the USA and now another in India, is Cosworth committed to remaining in Britain? “Absolutely! Our major centre of manufacture is at Northampton, right in the middle of what the Government has just announced as one of Britain’s Enterprise Zones. We have just over 200 people working for us there, and while we have another facility at Torrance in California that allows us to do some manufacturing, the vast majority of what we do is designed, manufactured and assembled in Britain.”
The Manufacturer of the Year Award says Szyjanowicz “demonstrates how we started out on a journey from F1 and motorsport manufacturing in 2005 and progressed to a point where we can compete and be considered the best in Britain’s manufacturing sector into which we have diversified. “Aerospace manufacturing for the likes of GE, Rolls-Royce, Goodridge, has been a challenge, and to deliver to SC21 levels for world top class blue chip customers demonstrates what Cosworth is able to achieve. “But we are extremely ambitious. The week after the award ceremony our people in Northampton were saying continuous improvement is far more important to us than the award. And Cosworth is all about the people who work for us.” The Manufacturer of the Year “is very good at focusing on what we do for the customers we work with, perhaps without realising the value of what we do for customers we haven’t yet met,” adds Szyjanowicz. “Cosworth’s value and ability is being able to work with customers as an engineering partner. We deal in solutions, we don’t deal in products. Much of what we do is working with a customer who has a particular need but not knowing how they are going to solve a specific problem. “Aston Martin is a fantastic example. They came to us needing an engine for their One-77 super car. They had a starting point in terms of a V12 engine, but wanted more power, less weight and it would have to be slightly shorter. That was our brief and we exceeded it in terms of the power increase and weight reduction. “More than just handing over a design blueprint we were able to do the entire service for them from working with their design team in the drawing office right through to producing prototypes, testing, validating, and then manufacturing, assembling and delivering the engines. “So whatever you think your problem may be, come and talk to us. You will find we can do an awful lot more together than you might imagine.” 7
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