Ten minutes and 26 seconds into our conversation, the bombshell drops: “What I can say now is that we will merge Forseven and McLaren. It will all exist under a McLaren umbrella.”

We had speculated as such in our reporting of Forseven previously, but to hear the words come out of the mouth of Forseven CEO Nick Collins made for quite a jaw-dropping moment. Wow, this is big!

Collins had been one of the faces of JLR over the past decade, but had joined the previously almost mythical Forseven 15 months ago and disappeared from public view. He's made quite the return.

Forseven had been operating differently to most start-ups in being almost entirely secretive, its only visible presence a holding web page and LinkedIn profiles of its ever-increasing staff listing it as their employer.

Most start-ups are noisy, building hype and therefore trying to attract investment. Forseven didn't need to do that as it is entirely funded by an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi state, McLaren effectively becoming the Manchester City of the car world. It means business, and the acquisition and now turbocharging of McLaren Automotive is a quite stunning development. 

“We didn't need to go big and bold, and say come fund us,” says Collins. “Our backers were already in place.” Indeed, as becomes clear in our conversation, Collins is not understating things when he says “we are much further down the line than most people think we are”.

Collins was attracted by the scale of the ambition of CYVN Holdings, leaving a board role at JLR, but having “always wanted to be the CEO of something”, it was a chance to not only do that but “build a legacy” in the process. 

“As reserved Brits, we get shy of being ambitious,” he says. “I genuinely felt we had the right ingredients coming together… That, while everybody else is hunkering down, gave us an opportunity to be aggressive going forwards.

"This is an amazing opportunity to have a once-in-a-lifetime crack with some talented people to leave something for generations to come.”

He references on a few occasions that CYVN “makes decisions faster than I've ever seen in any business”. While CYVN provides stability, financial or otherwise, that decisiveness allows for great flexibility, typified by Forseven’s go-to-market strategy to be as ballsy as to merge with McLaren.

Collins also speaks highly of the culture at Forseven, and that good culture creates good cars. Plus, the “cars that have been awful pretty much universally had a bad team”.

He's raring to kick-start this new era for the great name of McLaren, and while Forseven has no history of its own, it does actually have a link to McLaren's past, for what was founder Bruce McLaren's racing number? 47.