The 28-acre Oxfordshire headquarters of the bankrupt Caterham Formula One racing team has been put up for sale by the receivers with a guide price of £5.5m.
Formed in 2012 as a British Grand Prix team — as a spin off from the sportcar manufacturer Caterham Cars — Caterham F1 competed in just two race seasons before it entered administration late in 2014. Just months before its collapse, its owner and team principal Tony Fernandes announced he had sold the team to a consortium of Swiss and Middle Eastern investors.
Now, the group’s administrators have hired Carter Jonas and BNP Paribas Real Estate as agents to dispose of the group’s Leafield Technical Centre. The west Oxfordshire campus, used as a testing facility for its racing cars as well as the organisation’s administrative headquarters, offers 150,000 sq ft of assorted space.
“With its mixture of property types the site lends itself to a number of different uses and will be of interest to a variety of potential occupiers,” commented BNP Paribas’s Jonjo Lyles.
Described in the preliminary sale brochure as “a campus style development over an area of approximately 28-acres and containing a mix of office, research and development and industrial accommodation, the site contains six modern and traditional properties.
Building A, used for research and development, has two floors and offers almost 60,000 sq ft of usable space. Building B, the former workshop and offices, covers 11,600 sq ft. Building C offers a small 4,200 sq ft office space. Building D is a gatehouse storage facility of just over 6,000 sq ft. Building F includes offices, a reception area, and staff kitchen of almost 20,000 sq ft.
Building U, the biggest on-site structure, is a two-storey workshop space of almost 52,000 sq ft. It is described as “providing the principal research and development and workshop accommodation”. Built of a steel portal frame and construction in the mid-1990s, it has nine roller shutter doors providing access to a large yard.
A Carter Jonas spokesman said the campus is being offered freehold and currently has two tenants, the thermoplastics engineering company Ketonex and the low-cost battery researcher, Faradion. The leases for both tenants expire in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
The site, which has good transport links to Oxfordshire and the South-East, was originally built as a radio transmission station. It was redeveloped in the late 1980s and used by British Telecom as a residential training centre for 15 years.
From 1993 the renamed Leafield Technical Centre was expanded into a specialist motorsport facility and has been home to various motor racing teams including Arrows Formula One, Super Aguri F1 and latterly Caterham F1.
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