Longbow, the British start-up which revealed a £65,000 sub-tonne electric sports car earlier this year, has brought in former bosses of McLaren, Alpine, and Lotus as it pushes to bring its car to market.
Mike Flewitt, Michael van der Sande and Dan Balmer have all joined the firm’s new advisory board, which co-founder Daniel Davey – a former Tesla and Lucid engineer – dubbed the “holy trinity”.
Founded in 2023, Longbow announced its first project, an open-roof Speedster and Roadster coupé, in March. They will be built on a bespoke aluminium architecture and offer a 0-62mph time of 3.5sec, a 275-mile range, and tip the scales at just 895kg.
Davey doubled down on plans to build the cars in the UK with UK-made parts – everything bar battery cells. A production location is expected to be announced later this summer and first deliveries are planned for the end of 2027.
“The UK is our identity,” he said. “It's an important part of our story and why we're doing this. The British sports car industry and British sports cars are things I've always had on my wall since a small kid and have always been very important to me. And there's an opportunity to do something really special here.”
Such a task is daring, added Davey, which is why the new advisory board was created to eliminate issues. “You have plans and you have ideas, but what you need to be able to do is sense check each of those with people who've done it before,” he said.
“We've got people like Michael and Mike who've had those experiences that we can just ask 'how do we do this?', and they might say ‘this was horrible these five times [we experienced it], so do it this way’. That informs the plan that we already have.”
Fellow founder Mark Tapsott, formerly of BYD, said it was “car people building cars”, adding: “We wanted to work with the right partners.”
A complimentary note from former McLaren boss Flewitt is how he got involved with Longbow, he told Autocar.
“It all started with the car,” he said. “It was the car that attracted me first. And then, after talking with Mark and Daniel, it was the company [that attracted me].
He added: “I have a personal passion for lightweight sports cars. The ethos I brought to McLaren was all around engagement, lightweight and the driving characteristics of the cars there, which I felt marked McLaren out.
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