Lola to cut jobs despite expansion

As exclusively revealed in this week's AUTOSPORT magazine, the British company is to supply chassis next season to Japan's top single-seater championship, Formula Nippon, for the first time in six years.

Lola will build heavily modified versions of its Formula 3000 racer, filling the void left by former rival Reynard, which went out of business earlier this year.

The project adds another single-seater programme to its business, which already includes Champ Cars, F3000 and a planned Formula 3 car.

Lola is also taking on new projects outside of motorsport. It has recently bought the manufacturing rights to Britain's top racing rowing boat company, Aylings. Expansion into the defence industry and the supply of carbon composite reinforcements for bridge sections on major roadways is also being embarked upon.

Yet despite the new projects, Lola has announced a plan to "restructure the group's manufacturing capability". It will call on outside sources for more racing car components, leading to an unspecified number of redundancies - although some staff will be transferred internally to another recent acquistion, composites specialist CTS. Lola has also promised to help those who lose their jobs to find new employment.

Lola's head of group sales and marketing, Christopher Tate, said: "We believe that Lola will do the best for the majority of its present employees, for its customers, suppliers and partners if we take this action now, rather than await events in the optimistic expectation of a return to the markets of the 1990s.

"Lola is a design and engineering-led company, and we have accumulated much experience and developed practical plans for the future, here at Huntingdon. If we take these difficult decisions now and embrace the changes we need to implement, we can plan on a structured future with a chance to grow again as our strategy develops."