Caterham F1’s Parent Company Gains Performance Partnership with Sailing’s Alex Thomson Racing

December 19, 2011

Sports marketing firm Five West have announced their performance partnership with CaterhamComposites, the parent company of Caterham F1 with Sailing’s Alex Thomson Racing the first to benefit. 

The partnership will see Caterham Composites, a division of the Caterham Group, working with Five West ‘s grand prix yacht racing campaigns.

Caterham Composites is the design and performance specialist division of Caterham Group, the parent company of the Caterham F1 Team and Caterham Cars. Caterham Composites will lend their expertise in building technology solutions for carbon fibre structures in the motor-racing and airline industries to Five West’s ocean racing campaigns.

The partnership is an unprecedented move in competitive sailing, combining great British ocean racing talent and the technology and performance management expertise of Caterham Composites.  Alex Thomson Racing will be the first to benefit from the partnership.  Following his recent 2nd place finish in this year’s Transat Jacques Vabre and 4th place completion of the Transat B to B, Alex Thomson now has his sights set on being the first British sailor to win the solo, round-the-world Vendée Globe, which
starts on November 10th, 2012.  The partnership with Caterham Composites will facilitate the performance optimisation of Alex’s Open 60 yacht, HUGO BOSS, using advanced research andmethodology not previously available to sailing teams.

Mike Gascoyne, CEO of Caterham Composites and Chief Technical Officer of Caterham F1 Team, said: “We are very excited to be sharing our research and the outstanding expertise of
our technical team with Alex Thomson and the 5West team. This is a great opportunity to apply our knowledge to a different sport and to test our systems, while working with Britain’s best solo ocean skippers.”

Stewart Hosford, Managing Director, 5 West, added: ‘Formula 1 and ocean yacht racing teams face many of the same challenges. Reliability, performance, weight and safety are all similar concerns and like all high technology sports it is about having the best team and realising that the decisions you make six, and twelve, months in advance of a big race are as important as those made on the race course itself’.”