“If you want to build the safest car in the world, you’ll find that sort of engineering competence around Gothenburg,” says Ingenlath. “But if you want to design and build a low, sporty, exclusive, luxury GT car, then probably the engineering competence [is best found] in the UK. It’s world class for this kind of project.”
Allen, a quietly spoken but authoritative Scot, adds: “We’ve constructed a team according to the DNA we need in the product. We have people from F1, specialists from motorsport and a lot of premium niche manufacturers.”
He omits the fact that he himself was the programme lead for the development and delivery of the Mercedes–McLaren SLR, while Swift had a long stint at Lotus and was an engineering director at blue-blooded Canadian automotive innovator Multimatic. They both share an ambition to instil within the 5 a feeling of “sports car heritage”.
What exactly that means is something one hopes will become clear when we get behind the wheel of the car. For now, from an outsider’s perspective, you have to assume it alludes to a dynamic purity, transparency and all-round intuitiveness, but without sacrificing usability.
An appealing simplicity, perhaps. Does anything already out there exhibit all that? The entry-level RWD Taycan gets close but lacks practicality; AMG and M cars froth with heft and complexity; Tesla products are accurate and rabidly quick but the handling never sparkles.