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Lucy Nicholson reveals...
Meet the entrepreneur on a mission to cool down stresses execs over a hot stove at her base in Cumbria. EN reaches for the blue plasters as Lucy Nicholson reveals...
| Need for speed freaks |
| Friday, 23 November 2007 | |
Al Melling - a prolific engine designeer
So what are you up to tomorrow?” asked a pal on the eve of EN’s interview with engine designer Al Melling. “I’m off to see a guy who is building one of the world’s most powerful sportscars,” came the reply. “Oh really? Where’s that?” “Rochdale – near (mentions big retail outlet).” “Are you taking the piss?” There is something about Al Melling’s story which seems too much like a Boy’s Own Adventure to be true. In the world of motorsports, he is widely acknowledged by those in the know as one of the world’s greatest engine designers. However, to say that the 63 year-old has kept a low profile would be something of an understatement. If he were to walk through his hometown of Rochdale in his working gear on a Saturday afternoon, people would more likely wonder what happened to his Big Issue copies than trouble him for an autograph. Even the offices of Melling Consultancy & Design – the company he has run for 40 years with the help of wife Maureen – are anonymous. There is no sign, and EN must have driven past half a dozen times before admitting defeat and phoning for help. There are reasons for this – the most obvious being that he doesn’t wish to advertise the fact that he will soon be building the £130,000, 700bhp Melling Hellcat within the units. However, the fact that he’s been a consultant to the “crazy” world of F1 for more than 20 years, and that he has designed a couple of world championship-winning engines, means that his paranoia has sometimes seemed justified. “There used to be an engineering works across the road from here, and there were always cars parked on there spying on who was coming in and out,” he says. Melling has held a lifelong fascination with engines, which started in visits to cotton mills as a child. He wheeled his first engine home from a scrapyard at the age of eight and by the time he was in his teens he was modifying them and building his own bikes. “In those days it was very difficult to get books on anything like that from the local library, so I used to work out the calculations myself and put my own formulas to them,” e says. Such advanced knowledge – and a fiercely independent streak – meant he was “unemployable” when he finally left college with an engineering degree, and he claims to have tried around 100 jobs in his first two years. “One of them was as a policeman. I was on duty in Oldham one night and saw a bloke throwing a brick through this garage window,” he says. “In those days, you didn’t have radios so I blew me whistle and tried to catch him. But then two more jumped out and gave me a good hiding. So that was that.” His attempts at gainful employment in British motorcycle firms like Norton and BSA were similarly doomed. “I had things in my mind and I was convinced I was right and everyone else was wrong,” he says. “This was in the days when the Japanese had just started building motorbikes, and my ideas were closer to theirs. But they were too futuristic for Britain. “When all of these bikes started coming out of Japan and selling like hot cakes, the British industry went down the tubes.” It was a Japanese manufacturer that gave Melling his first break in 1964 following a chance meeting at the Isle of Man TT races. He struck up a conversation with a Japanese engineer and after “an awful lot of talking” he was commissioned to produce his first engine. “I came home biting my fingernails thinking ‘how the fuck am I going to do this?’ But I put 100 per cent into it and it was successful. I reckon they made 15,000-20,000 of those over the years.” Since then, Melling Consultancy & Design (MCD) has designed literally hundreds of engines, 38 of which have made it into production (although he’s bound by confidentiality agreements to say for whom). Alongside the F1-winning engines, he produced the engine that won Le Mans for the former Silk Cut Jaguar team and scores of others for mass-market sportscars in the States, as well as more niche brands such as TVR. Until seven years ago, these new engine designs comprised around 60 per cent of MCD’s work, Melling reckons. Expert witness work on court cases between manufacturers and insurers trying to prove or disprove design flaws, or manufacturers suing each other over perceived patent infringements represented a further ten per cent. The remainder was on consultancy projects for major sportscar firms such as Porsche, Ferrari and BMW. “Whenever they had a problem with one of their new engines, they’d call us. One or two of the in-house engineers nicknamed us International Rescue.” Melling explains that although inhouse engineers were extremely bright and capable, they all concentrated on perfecting individual components and it was when these were brought together that problems were often uncovered. “They might have a guy designing the best cylinder heads in the world, but he could be five floors away from the guy producing the cylinder locks,” he says. His decision to build his own sportscars came as a result of one such stressful assignment. He had flown to Portugal where his yacht Monos – “It’s Greek for The Only One, because it was the only one the shipyard built” – was moored, only to be plagued with calls from an assignment where engine problems were delaying the launch of a new sportscar. “It was holding up production so it was costing a bloody fortune, and it had been dragging on for months,” he explains. “My mind started to drift and I thought ‘This is bloody crazy! I can’t keep coming up with new engines’,” he says. Given that each one takes around five years to bring to fruition and he was only a couple of years shy of his 60th birthday, he says he started to think about doing what he described as his “Cartier”. A couple of years earlier, Melling had been part of a consortium that tried to purchase Rolls Royce from Vickers in order to keep it in British hands. Despite raising £550 million, it lost out to a joint BMW/Volkswagen bid. “It was political, and had nothing to do with what was best for Rolls Royce,” argues a still-rankled Melling. The partners then set about building an exclusive British marque independently. “The interior was to be done by Cartier, with the boot and luggage by Aspreys,” he explains. “The roofline was high enough to get in and out with a tiara on.” This plan ground to a halt when the wife of one of the partners died unexpectedly, but Melling eventually decided that the next engine he designed from scratch would be his own. Since then, he has designed a gentleman’s speedboat inspired by the classic Italian manufacturer Rivi, a range of associated swimwear and a huge cruising bike – all of which are named after his yacht, Monos. However, it is the 700bhp, six-litre Melling Hellcat, and its stablemate the Melling Griffon, which have taken over his life. He estimates that he and three other unnamed investors (one of whom has been outed by the press as former prog rock legend Rick Wakeman) have put an estimated £6 million into their development, with nothing coming the other way as yet. However, he says he is experienced enough to put in guarantees which mean the partners won’t walk away empty-handed. For instance, Melling says the patents and intellectual property inherent within the car’s designs mean the partners will see a return even if they never sell a single Hellcat. “If you look at Jensen, what they did there was ridiculous. It had a lot of investors, but they squandered the money and the company went bust.” He has also agreed a partnership deal in the States which has led to the flotation of Viper Melling Sportscars on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and he says the first Melling Griffons – a £50,000 car with around 400bhp which he envisages competing with entry-level Porsches – should go on sale early next year. “We’ve got to get it finished by Christmas, so we can start production in January,” he says. “We’ll have eight cars and eight engines built by then – then there’s the small matter of putting the engines in the cars.” He says he originally planned to launch the Hellcat first, but bowed to demand in the US for the Griffon model. It will be built there, and he believes the firm will turn out around eight cars each month. He hopes to unveil the more exclusive Hellcat at the British Motor Show next July. At 700bhp, it isn’t quite as powerful as the Bugatti Veyron but then its price tag is nowhere near the Veyron’s $1.7 million. Melling is hoping to begin producing two Hellcats per month from his Rochdale base within the next 12 months. He envisages few problems with sales (there is already a waiting list), but admits that he has struggled to find decent engineers. In fact, his doomed attempt to buy TVR earlier this year from the administrators was, he says, largely inspired by his desire to get his hands on the firm’s experienced carmakers. Since the closure of the Blackpool business, he’s tried to entice former TVR workers to join him in Rochdale by offering to ferry them all back and forth on a coach, but he says many of them are “too parochial”. “They wouldn’t do it because they saw it as an hour of their time wasted. The biggest percentage of the workers have gone to a company that repairs buses, others are working as car salesmen and these skills have just gone,” he says. “We’re gaining a lot of respect from people for building a car in Britain, but it’s very hard going. The basic engineering skills are not here.”       |
