WERU Conference:The UK Motorsport Industry

The UK is a world-centre of auto technology innovation and for creative activity in high performance engineering and technology, event infrastructure, creative services and merchandising. The industry’s success has owed nothing to direct government intervention. However the time may be right to counter the global competitive threats to the UK’s traditional, but fragile, dominance . It may lose its expert knowledge of advanced automotive engineering and leadership in staging major races unless barriers to growth in accessing new markets, improving skills and harnessing technology developments can be effectively addressed. In the face of the threat from the increasing global appeal of the sport, this world class community of knowledge deserves to be developed and enhanced to encourage further investment and retain it as a UK-based cluster. A number of interventions are being made at national, regional and local levels to do so