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British sports car maker Caterham Cars which is owned by Air Asia and Queens Park Rangers owner Tony Fernandez is growing it’s sales by 30% and opening a new flagship showroom employing 25 staff on Fleming Way in Crawley, West Sussex.

The new 23,000 square foot facility, known as Caterham South, is on an industrial estate close to Gatwick Airport and will provide room for around 50 new and used Caterhams, a 5 bay service and accident repair department as well as the firm’s sales and marketing team. The showroom will be officially opened on April 6th by Formula 1 car designer Mike Gascoyne,

Talking about the reason for the move, Caterham Cars CEO Graham McDonald said, “Up until 2 years ago our showroom was in Caterham, it’d been there since the 1970s, but we were only tenants and regrettably the landlord decided he could make more by selling the site for development rather than taking a rent from ourselves. Crawley is 25 miles south of Caterham and serves our largest customer base which happens to be the south east of England. The new location allows us to bring all of our retail operations including new and used car sales, servicing and parts for the south into one building.”

Referring to the company’s plans to recruit new franchisees, McDonald said, “We are looking for strategic partners in the UK. It’s a very niche product and it works differently from your main franchise dealers. We are looking for existing dealers who are in niche markets, so they may be dealing already with Lotus, Morgan or some sort of specialist product that Caterham would fit comfortably alongside. I don’t think there is an avenue for us to go into one of the major OEM franchises, because we are a completely different business model.”

The company has also recently introduced three new additions to its car range. The Seven 270, 360 and 480 are intended to simplify Caterham’s range to five core models. In addition, all Caterham Sevens can now be specified with brand new ‘S’ or ‘R’ equipment packages.

According to Caterham, the new variants of the Seven deliver ‘accessible fun’ through the traditional Caterham minimalistic, lightweight approach to sports car engineering. The three new vehicles sit between the existing entry-level Seven 160 and the supercharged 620R, the most powerful production Seven ever built.

Graham McDonald told Motor Trade News that Caterham Cars Group which manufactures around 500 cars per year at it’s factory in Dartford is budgeted to increase that to around 650 cars this year, 75% of which will be exported. After the UK the top markets for Caterham are France and Japan. Dealers interested in finding out more about working with Caterham should e-mail [email protected]

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