The MOTOR Awards 2021: Biggest Personality

Welcome to the MOTOR Awards 2021, where our team offer a tip of the hat to those that displayed automotive excellence in the last 12 months.

Biggest Personality Winner: Tobias Moers

In the overall scheme of things, Aston Martin is a bit-part player. It’s a company that has lurched from one financial crisis to another. In 2018, its IPO bombed, shares dropping 6.5 per cent on the day of issue and tanked by 75 per cent not long after. That was enough to see its then-CEO, Andy Palmer, ushered out of the door at Gaydon with the cardboard box and pot plant.

In 2020, Aston Martin sold 4150 vehicles worldwide, a drop of 32 per cent from 2019. The company was in dire straits, coming from a base of chronic overpromising and underdelivering. Cue one Lawrence Sheldon Strulovich, better known as Lawrence Stroll, who led a consortium that acquired 16.7 per cent of the company in January 2020. There was one man on their radar to lead the company into a new future: AMG’s Tobias Moers.

Moers is a hard taskmaster with a phenomenal work rate. He prizes attention to detail and engineering excellence. Whereas most CEOs would take some time to acclimatise to the culture of a business, Moers arrived on day one like a wrecking ball.

Since landing the role in August 2020, he’s redrawn the product map, shuttered the Gaydon paint shop in favour of sweating the business’s superior assets in the new Welsh factory, mollified an angry workforce, put the red pen through plans for a new engine, ordered the Valhalla supercar to be restyled and has put his imprimatur on the Valkyrie hypercar, a project that seems to have suffered a lack of design freeze.

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Moers oversaw a plan to run down old inventory and shift to a forensically demand-driven model. The effects will take a couple of years to materialise, with the company due to be free-cashflow positive by 2023. Already products like the Vantage F1 Edition are attracting a slew of younger buyers, Moers noting an increase in performance-oriented buyers.

The rebranding of the Racing Point F1 team to Aston Martin colours in 2021 is something that Moers sees as a cultural touchpoint within the road car business, bringing F1’s performance culture to the company.

This January, Citigroup’s head of European automotive research upgraded Aston Martin from Neutral to Buy. Deutsche Bank noted “Aston Martin ticking the boxes on what’s needed to build a track record and taking it one step at a time to deliver on the full-year targets.”

We’ll have to wait and see if those targets are met, but the first six months of 2021 netted a 224 per cent sales increase, with more than half of them accounted for by the DBX SUV.If you want a pithy soundbite, Moers is not your man. If you need a prestige car company that’s in a bit of a mess turned around quick smart, it’s hard to think of anyone better.

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Honourable mention: Lewis Hamilton

Whether he wins a historic eighth driver’s championship or not, Hamilton has etched his place in F1 history, his jaw-dropping achievement of over 100 wins and 100 poles being more than Prost and Senna combined on both measures. Love him or hate him, you can’t argue with that record.

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Honourable mention: Akio Toyoda

Toyoda guided Toyota through a tough 2020, retaining profitability despite the burdens of Covid-19. He has put in place a template for success in bringing cars that are fun to drive back to Toyota all while participating in motorsports himself. If you want to look for a CEO that lives the value, Toyoda’s your man.

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