50 Large and 50 Small

I can think of very few businesses—aside from magazine publishing—where the odds are more stacked against you than being a racecar manufacturer. Your product is multifaceted and technologically complicated, yet you have usually less than 12 months available to go from new design to finished product. Production requires expensive and extensive tooling and enormous amounts of skilled labor. Your success, in greater or lesser degrees, is dependent on numerous suppliers, and therefore somewhat outside your sphere of control. And in the cruelest business irony of all, if too successful, your product could be outlawed! Need I go on?

With all this said, it is perhaps not surprising that the life of a racecar manufacturer is, for the most part, a short one. Most fold up shop in the first year or two. Some survive five, maybe ten years. More than that and the list begins to get surprisingly thin. Keep in mind, we speak here of companies that only manufacture purpose-built racing cars. Companies like Porsche, Ferrari, Lotus, and Mercedes-Benz don’t count because their passenger car sales have always supported their racing efforts. No, when the discussion turns to businesses that have consistently built racecars for more than 20 years you can pretty much count the players on one hand.