Exclusive: McGovern addresses “disinformation” around his exit from Gaydon, and maps out next steps
Gerry McGovern is in his element, leaning back in a comfortable chair, clad in a characteristically colourful tailored blue jacket, holding forth on the minutiae of vehicle design and smiling a lot.
It’s as if nothing has changed since his Range Rover days. We’re in a large meeting room with a bunch of late-build prototypes visible through the glass wall. Just down the hall is a big design studio.
What’s different is that this is Norton Motorcycles’ HQ on the outskirts of Solihull, not JLR down the road. Once a John Lewis warehouse, it is now repurposed – as part of a £250 million global ‘resurgence’ strategy – as Norton’s design and development HQ. It’s where the company’s just-launched flagship superbike, the 1200cc Manx R, is being made. A second model, the 585cc twin-cylinder Atlas adventure bike, designed here but made in India, is arriving in dealerships now.
Though we’re talking two wheels not four, the similarities to McGovern’s former working life are striking. The newly revived Norton company, like Tata-owned JLR, has a well-financed, well-established Indian owner as its backer, the Chennai-based TVS Motor Company that made nearly six million motorcycles last year.
Back in 2020, TVS paid £16m to buy Norton out of administration, after a previous owner had attempted to keep it alive by pillaging its pension funds. Its chairman and managing director today is Sudarshan Venu, who led the acquisition of the outfit and is now very much the driver of Norton’s expansion.
Sudarshan has already been described by McGovern as reminding him of “a young Mr Tata”, praise indeed since McGovern’s own design skills were rapidly recognised at JLR by the late legendary patriarch, Ratan Tata, who was regarded as unusually design-aware among global business leaders. It was Ratan Tata who introduced McGovern to TVS in the first place.
It’s 18 months since I’ve seen McGovern. The last time was at the reveal of Jaguar’s Type 00 concept, whose transition to production is nearing conclusion. However, McGovern sensationally left JLR at the end of last year, having allegedly been escorted from the building before returning to leave amicably a couple of months later. There’s no polite way of asking exactly what happened, so I dive straight in.
“Such a lot has been written about this,” says McGovern wearily, “and is disinformation. The reality was in the formal announcement: I decided to move on and try other things. I’d been at JLR for 24 years and was proud of what we’d done. But there’s a point where you start wondering how long you can go on. I’d done three generations of Evoque, two of Range Rover and two of Range Rover Sport. Plus the new Defender. That was a lot. And then there was the Jaguar. Leaving was on my mind and I’d been talking to the company about it for a while. So the speculation about me was pretty inaccurate.”
McGovern feels no animosity or awkwardness towards JLR now: “Why would I? I still love those brands. You can’t just walk away. I’ve got a Defender Octa right now. When I’m in London, I love seeing Range Rovers and Defenders. Twenty years ago when I talked about Defenders in an urban environment, I’d get laughed at…”
Foolishly, I make some reference to McGovern’s “new roots at Norton” so he reminds me he’s known the TVS bosses since well before the Norton acquisition. He was actually at dinner with Sudarshan on the night six years ago when the actual deal was done.
McGovern was soon invited to advise TVS on rebuilding Norton’s brand, design structure and products, and in 2025 he joined the company officially as its chief creative advisor. You might reckon his arrival spelled difficult times for Norton’s existing head of design, Simon Skinner, a straight-talking motorcycle ‘lifer’ who admitted in his first meeting with McGovern that, as an engineer first and foremost, he had far less specialist design experience than his new mentor.
Yet the two have bonded well. Skinner finds McGovern easier to deal with than many other design professionals he could name. McGovern is impressed that Skinner’s instinct for reductionist, modernist design matches his own.
Skinner, severely short of resources, was previously designing Norton stuff on his own kitchen table; McGovern has helped him establish a proper design structure. And when the current models were mooted, the pair set off to the nearby National Motorcycle Museum to find “salient points” about previous Norton designs that might help.
“What impressed me about Simon was that he recognised immediately I was coming to help, not take over,” says McGovern. “Also, I don’t believe in retro design, and neither does he. What we discovered from investigating Norton’s heritage was that the bikes were very forward-looking against their opposition, which was something we could use.”
McGovern says he approached bike design with trepidation but discovered it had much in common with cars: “If you’re developing a brand, you’ve got to consider its perspective first. What’s its reason for being? Where was it born? When was it established? What are its values? Defender’s an example. It was born in the country and it liberated people. It was purposeful and took them on adventures. That informed the new design.”
One challenge to the bike designer with reductionist ideals, says McGovern, is dealing with exposed mechanicals – making components look integrated rather than “like a bag of spaghetti”.
But painstaking efforts have worked: the Manx and Atlas look graceful and integrated, not least when artfully parked by Skinner next to a selection of spiky-looking opposition products.
Bikes are all very well but I’m keen to talk cars again, specifically McGovern’s latest Range Rover, in my view his greatest design. It’s so perfect that I often wonder if he has an idea in his head that would move it into a third generation – and here’s a chance to ask.
“Maybe that’s why I left,” he says, only half joking. “I just couldn’t see a new generation. I mean, if you look at the way Range Rover has evolved from the original to where it is now, it does now have a very high level of sophistication. It’s pared back to within a fraction of its life. You couldn’t refine it any more. Mind you, we would never have reached today’s level if we hadn’t done the car before it. But another Range Rover like the current one would be a massive challenge.”
McGovern is intrigued by the arrival of Ferrari’s new Luce EV, given that he knows its star designers, Jony Ive and Marc Newson, well and understands car company politics better than most.
Ferrari was brave to get such fresh opinions on how much the marque’s DNA needed to change for an EV project. McGovern is pretty sure that if the firm had given the job to specialist car designers, they would have produced a less shocking result, but probably less polarising.
“What’s my own view of the car? I’ve learned that you never comment on a design until you’ve seen it in the flesh – and I haven’t,” he says. “But I look at its interior and I can tell it is built to an extremely high level of quality. Jony Ive is incredible in the way he approaches that.”
McGovern reckons Ferrari’s mistake was how it communicated the Luce’s significance. It needed to make clear whether this was the direction for all future Ferrari design, or just electric models, and it didn’t. Understandably, McGovern abhors the personal criticism directed at the designers after the car’s launch. “I’ve had some treatment,” he says, “but nothing like that.”
Talking about controversial car projects soon introduces the Jaguar Type 00 – McGovern’s own time in the firing line – but he seems to have few regrets about how it went.
“Most people hadn’t realised that Jaguar needed to be reinvented,” he says. “The brand was failing. It had been great in its heyday, but nobody was buying cars. It was losing big money for many years. We needed a complete reimagining of the brand and the product.”
Behind the eventual Type 00 stood 17 full-size proposals, says McGovern, but knowing that a prestige brand is much more than a concept car, Jaguar’s people recognised that they also needed to build and develop the brand values. That’s where the controversial ‘androgynous people’ video came in, so comprehensively hated by the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and even Nigel Farage.
“It was taken out of context,” says McGovern. “What we were trying to say is that Jaguar had to be unique, a copy of nothing. That film took us into a bigger cultural debate about behaviour; at the time I didn’t even know what wokeism was. But it did mean Jaguar was the most talked about brand in the world for four months. And it hadn’t been talked about at all for years before that…”
McGovern has spent much of our interview being genial and emollient, but when I ask if he reckons history will see the Type 00 as the peak of his design career, he’s firm and unflinching in his rebuttal. “You haven’t seen the peak yet,” he retorts. One car that really is a peak, he will allow, is the latest Defender, surrounded in the beginning by controversy of its own, mainly generated by people who just wanted to keep building the outgoing model, or something a lot like it.
“If you do a car and everybody’s instantly comfortable with it,” says McGovern, “it’s probably going to fail. I can remember people coming onto our stands at motor shows and saying I was killing the brand with the new Defender. I’d ask how they’d like it to look and they’d say ‘like the old one’. I’d have to explain about the legislation that stopped it.”
McGovern has been designing cars for half a century. What comes next? McGovern’s eyes tell me he thinks about this often. “I want to do new stuff,” he says carefully, “and I’m aware there are many opportunities out there. I’ve had a lot of approaches. I’m very particular about what I want, and who I work with. But I’m definitely going to do more cars. They’re in my blood.”
