Cosworth - Corporate History

Corporate History

The company was founded as a British racing internal combustion engine maker in 1958 by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth (1933-2005) (COStin and duckWORTH). Cosworth, despite being an independent company, was supported by Ford Motor Company for many years, and most of the Cosworth engines were named as Ford engines.

The company went through a number of ownership changes. After Keith Duckworth decided he didn't want to be involved with the day-to-day business of running a growing company, he sold out to United Engineering Industries (UEI) in 1980, retaining his life presidency and day-to-day technical involvement with Cosworth, and becoming a UEI board director; UEI was a group of small to medium-sized technology companies which was taken over by Carlton Communications in 1988 - Carlton was primarily interested in some of the audio-visual companies in the UEI portfolio and Cosworth was a poor fit with these; a new buyer for the company in the engineering/automotive sector was sought and the traditional engineering company Vickers plc bought Cosworth in 1990. In 1998, Vickers sold Cosworth and Pi Research to Ford. In September, 2004 Ford announced that it was selling Cosworth and Pi Research, along with Cosworth Racing Ltd and its Jaguar Formula One team. On 15 November 2004, the sale of Cosworth was completed, to Champ Car World Series owners Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven, the current Cosworth Group.

The road car engine aspect of the business was split from the racing division following the sale of the engineering division of Cosworth to VW/Audi in September 1998 and renamed Cosworth Technology, before being acquired by Mahle GmbH in 2005. Cosworth Technology was then renamed as MAHLE Powertrain on 1 July 2005.