Bentley Motors appoints Ansar Ali as Mulliner and Motorsport director

Bentley Motors has appointed former McLaren Special Operations director Ansar Ali to lead its Mulliner and Motorsport divisions.

Ali’s dual responsibilities at Bentley cover Motorsport activities, working closely with the GT3 race teams currently competing, and a focus on Bentley’s personal commissioning division, Mulliner, the oldest coachbuilder in the world and now with three distinct classifications; Classics, Collections and Coachbuilt.

He will report directly to Adrian Hallmark, chairman and CEO. 

Hallmark said: “Mulliner represents the very pinnacle of automotive design and expertise and Ansar joins at a time when we are experiencing record levels of demand across our features, collections, coachbuilt and classics possibilities. Ansar’s considerable industry experience, particularly leading low-volume, highly bespoke customer-led divisions will offer valuable insights that will reinforce Mulliner as the leading personal commissioning division and generate significant contributions to the wider Bentley business.”   

Ali will lead a reorganised Mulliner bespoke division in which Paul Williams becomes chief technical officer, having held a number of senior positions in a 15 year career at Bentley, and Bob Martin, formerly head of Final Assembly at Bentley, becomes chief operating officer.

The high level of customer demand for bespoke services, reaching record numbers in 2022, helped push Bentley to its third consecutive record sales year, announcing earlier this week a sales success of 15,174 in 2022, a four per cent increase on 2021.      

The Volkswagen Group-owned OEM has said it will only sell plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles (EVs) by 2026 and will switch to EV-only by 2030.

The first Bentley EV is scheduled to roll off the production line in 2025, marking a significant step in the company’s Beyond100 strategy.