CREDENTIALS AND PEOPLE
20th April 2012
The Eterniti team has extensive automotive industry experience in diverse but key areas – including engineering and luxury brand retailing in major markets in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Engineering and Motor Sport
Engineering is at the heart of the company, and the team is led by one of the automotive industry’s best engineers, Alastair Macqueen. Macqueen demonstrated his ability to create the ultimate in road cars as Chief Development Engineer for the Jaguar XJ220 supercar, developing it from early prototype to production in 1991, following which it was officially recognised as the world’s fastest road car.
In motor sport he had already engineered Martin Brundle in his epic Formula 3 title battle with Ayrton Senna before becoming Chief Engineer for TWR on the Jaguar Group C cars which won the World Sportscar Championship (WSC) in 1987 and 1988, and the Le Mans 24-Hour classic in 1988 and 1990. He then established Toyota as winners in the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) - with the racing version of the Carina E road car - as well as the WSC before steering Team Bentley to a one-two at Le Mans in 2003 for a hat-trick of personal outright victories. He has since demonstrated his remarkable versatility as run engineer for the JCB diesel world land speed record car which set a new benchmark of over 350mph in 2006 and secured the record for Britain.
Macqueen has an extraordinary endorsement from Mercedes Benz Grand Prix’s Ross Brawn, the technical guru who emerged at Jaguar before first guiding Michael Schumacher to F1 world championships at Benetton and Ferrari, and then Jenson Button at his eponymous F1 team. Brawn credits Macqueen for enabling the strategic genius for which he has become legendary. “I was lucky because I walked into Jaguar and there was a whole team of guys who were used to strategic racing. Alastair Macqueen was the strategy guy at Jaguar, a very clever guy who had years of experience... I was able to pick it up from Alastair very quickly and that really was my first exposure to it.”
The Eterniti engineering and testing programmes are aided by British former F1 driver Johnny Herbert. Herbert won three Grands Prix, for Benetton and the British Stewart team, including the 1995 British Grand Prix when he was team-mate to Michael Schumacher, going on to finish fourth in the championship. He also drove for Sauber, Jaguar, Lotus, Ligier and Tyrrell during a twelve-year Formula 1 career. Like Macqueen, Herbert has tasted outright victory at Le Mans, for Mazda in 1991. Since Formula 1 he has concentrated on sports cars, winning the Le Mans Series in 2004, but he returned to Jordan as Sporting Relations Manager for the Grand Prix team in 2005 and 2006, when it became Midland F1.
Herbert and Macqueen have a long association – as adversaries as well as colleagues. They are both graduates of Eddie Jordan Racing, Herbert winning the British Formula 3 title for Jordan in 1987. However, Herbert came between Jaguar and a third Le Mans win when he drove the Mazda, scoring the first and only victory for a Japanese manufacturer ahead of the three Jaguars - driving “indecently fast” as Macqueen puts it. But in 2003 they were on the same side at Team Bentley, Johnny recording fastest lap and fastest stint by any of the drivers in the Bentley one-two finish.
Eterniti is working closely with a roster of key partners, many of which also have a motor sport pedigree. In 2008 Eterniti partners conceived and ran the Aston Martin Asia Cup (AMAC), the brand’s first ever one-make racing series, for race-built versions of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage called N24s. AMAC events took place throughout the Asia-Pacific region, with races in China, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, including support races at the Chinese and Singapore Grands Prix.
Eterniti’s partners have also run a sports car team in Europe with considerable success. The GruppeM Racing team won the British GT Championship with a Porsche 911 RSR in its debut year, 2004. Porsche was so impressed that it asked GruppeM to run factory-supported cars internationally the following season, with remarkable results. Competing in the FIA GT2 series GruppeM not only finished first and second in the championship but won every race in the series, which included the Spa 24-hour classic. The team also won the 2005 Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, a feat which it repeated in 2007. In between GruppeM ran a Ferrari 430 in FIA GT2 in 2006, scoring several wins.
Eterniti intends to establish a racing team alongside the road car operation at a date to be confirmed. The motorsport programme will be managed by Tim Sugden, who has raced with GruppeM since its inception. He drove the British championship-winning GruppeM car in 2004, the runner-up car in the 2005 FIA series and the title-winning Porsche Carrera Cup Asia car in both 2005 and 2007.
Sugden has raced since the age of twelve, becoming the captain of the British karting team before progressing to single-seaters, culminating in Formula 3000. He then switched to touring cars, competing in the BTCC as a works driver for BMW, Vauxhall and Toyota, where he was engineered by Alastair Macqueen.
In 1997 he moved into sports cars, winning the British GT Championship in his first year. The following season he finished fourth overall at Le Mans in a McLaren, the highest-placed non-works car. He has since concentrated on sports cars, racing and winning all over the world, but also working as a consultant to racing teams including Prodrive and Aston Martin’s development partner JMW Motorsport.
Sugden now serves as General Manager of Eterniti Motors.
Retailing
Eterniti personnel have extensive experience of retailing some of the most prestigious British and European luxury and high-performance car brands, particularly in the UK and Asia-Pacific markets.
Global Sales Director Marcus Kenny has recently joined Eterniti from a senior executive role at HR Owen Rolls-Royce, the world’s most prestigious Rolls-Royce dealership in London’s Mayfair. He joined the brand in 2009 to help deliver commission builds to the higher volumes demanded by the introduction of the Ghost model.
Kenny had already been with HR Owen for eight years, having joined its Jack Barclay showroom at the same Mayfair site in 2001 to represent Bentley, specialising in commission builds of the Arnage model range.
Kenny will be responsible for Eterniti sales offices in London, Taipei, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and for recruiting and managing dealers in other markets including China.
He is supported by Sales Manager Andrew Brown who has spent 25 years in the UK premium and luxury car industry, having held senior sales positions representing Ferrari and Bentley within both national sales organisation and dealership group environments.
After joining Ferrari’s UK retail flagship Maranello Sales he became the Ferrari F430 Specialist, with responsibility for launch activities and customer data as well as hosting the F430 Challenge Series throughout Europe. Latterly he was the Bentley specialist at the Broughtons luxury dealer group, which also represents Aston Martin, Spyker and Koenigsegg.
Eterniti has several key partners who also bring an important international luxury car retailing perspective and valuable experience of the Asia-Pacific region, having set up two of China’s first Porsche dealerships and then, in 2008, its first ever Aston Martin importership, to officially establish the brand in the country.
Brand and Communications
Eterniti’s brand and communications is headed by Mark Carbery, who has spent over twenty years in the automotive industry including the launch of two completely new car brands and experience of working with OEM product development teams.
Carbery joined Toyota to head its UK PR operation as it was introducing the Lexus brand. He was part of Toyota Motor Europe R&D’s prototype testing team and also heavily involved in the company’s BTCC, WTCC, WRC and Le Mans motor sport programmes, during which time he first worked with Tim Sugden and Alastair Macqueen. He then played a major role in launching Daewoo’s revolutionary no-dealer retail model and creating its customer service brand positioning, which resulted in record UK market share for a new brand. While there he worked with Daewoo’s then global product chief Dr Ulrich Bez, now CEO of Aston Martin. In 1999 he moved to Michelin Tyre as Director of Communications, Northern Europe. He was also appointed to a small, global team formed to exploit Michelin’s Formula 1 entry in 2001, with responsibility for devising the media and launch strategies.
He has since been in consultancy, and in 2011 worked with ex-Ford of Europe and Maserati boss Martin Leach launching a ground-breaking retail offering for a major OEM brand.
Beijing Auto China 2012 Press Kit:
WORLD’S FIRST SUPER-SUV
BRAND
BUSINESS CASE
ETERNITI PRESS CALL
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