After 18 years at the helm, Simon Dowson has left his role as Managing Director of Delta Cosworth at Silverstone Park.
But he has insisted: “I don’t think it’s goodbye; I think it’s ‘see you later’. I expect things I do in the future – very possibly in motorsport – will mean I end up at Silverstone at some point or other, either on track or off track.”
Since locating his company, née Delta Motorsport, to Silverstone Park in 2007, Simon has taken it from five employees to more than 75.
Acquired by Cosworth in 2021, the company has grown to become one of the UK’s leading developers in electric drivetrains and innovators in high performance battery systems.
Simon co-founded Delta Motorsport in 2005 with the late Nick Carpenter (who passed away in 2020) – they had struck up an effective working relationship when employed together at race car constructor Reynard in the late nineties.
Initially the business was focused on motorsport and its first project was a seemingly impossible task – to design and build 15 state-of-the-art single-seater racing cars for ex-F1 legends in the then-new international series called Grand Prix Masters.
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“The company which was meant to build them finally admitted they couldn’t deliver the project – I owned the tooling for the Reynard IndyCar project, so we modified that and made it happen,” recollected Simon.
But as he also reflected: “Motorsport championships were increasingly following the ‘single-make’ route – innovation was dying.
“I’ve always liked taking on a challenge – proving people who say it can’t be done wrong – and that really is what made us look elsewhere.
“We could see that the opportunities to innovate were in cleantech, so we looked at which areas to exploit and tried to make sure that what we were doing was different to everybody else.”
In addition to becoming a renowned name in electric vehicle innovation, Delta Motorsport continued its success in international motorsport, collaborating with Silverstone Park neighbour (Alan) Docking Racing to form a new race team, Delta-ADR, in the 2012 and 2013 within the World Endurance Championship’s LMP2 class.
“Doing the LMP2 project with Alan meant a lot,” continued Simon. “He knew my dad from racing (Simon’s father was renowned race car preparation specialist, the late Roger Dowson). It’s always been good doing things with people on-site.”
Two years after setting up in Unit 2250, expansion into the neighbouring Unit 2245 followed. In 2015, Delta Motorsport’s footprint at Silverstone Park increased further when it took occupancy of Unit 9 – the first industrial property constructed by developer MEPC (Simon and Nick are pictured below, left, at the building’s completion with the MEPC team of the time).
The property remains Delta Cosworth’s HQ building to this day, whilst demand for the company’s expertise across a variety of cleantech projects has also necessitated additional properties.
Simon explained: “Our work developing the catalytic generator (a power generator that allows for the down-sizing of battery systems) needed test chambers, so we put all that into unit 13 and took unit 14 to start manufacturing our own battery systems.
“We have since taken two more premises at Silverstone Park – 1145 (scale up of battery production) and 1141 (test and development plus stores).”
Simon is rightly proud of the contracts the company won and how he and Nick grew their business in terms of employee numbers and giving career opportunities to young people.
He said: “We’ve had some tremendous projects. Being successful on the track as a race team and race engineering, to supercar design and build work, the electrification/hybridisation of a boat and numerous road vehicles… all these things were very enjoyable.
“If I had to pick one (project), though, it’s the Delta E4 Coupe, a fully electric car that we designed and built ourselves. Taking that on the road in 2011 – a car nobody had seen the likes of before and showing what was possible – was special.”
Simon added: “Nick and I didn’t have grand aspirations necessarily when we started out, but then you get older and it was during Covid that we probably had that ‘mission accomplished’ feeling – what’s the next challenge?
“When you start thinking that, then you begin looking for an investor or buyer and doing the transition to make sure the company is in good hands for the future.
“It was important for Nick and myself to give people a chance – it’s something we were both lucky to be given 25 years ago. It’s not always about the brightest people because you have to find a balance of characters with different skills to build a business and that’s been very rewarding.
“There are still people at Delta Cosworth who date back to the early years and leaving those people is probably the hardest part because you know them and you trust them.”
