Ineos vs Land Rover takes to the high seas

Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos boss, is sponsoring Britain's America's Cup team

Jim Ratcliffe, boss of the Ineos firm that is developing the Grenadier as a rival to the off-sale Defender, is taking over sponsorship of Britain's America's Cup team

Sometimes you can read too much into something, but it’s hard not raise a flicker of an eyebrow at the news that Ineos - the petrochemical company that is building its own rival to the Land Rover Defender, called the Grenadier - has taken over the lead sponsorship of Ben Ainslie’s America’s Cup yachting team from… Land Rover.

Needless to say Land Rover has nothing to say on the subject. Its sponsorship of the team had come to an end anyway, so why should it? In the same month that parent firm Jaguar Land Rover announced it was cutting its workforce by 1000 people, you might argue (on their behalf) at the logic of not matching Ineos’s £110m sponsorship package.

But, regardless of the fact that the deal is very much designed to promote the petrochemical company that has made him a billionaire, and not the Defender-that-isn’t-a-Defender revival that is likely to lose him a few quid, it’s hard not to believe that there’s isn’t a smidgen of a twinkle in the eye of Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe - a man, lest we forget, who is no stranger to controversy via his involvement in everything from fracking to plastics production - at the deal.

Those with a long memory will recall that when news of Ratcliffe’s plans to revive the Defender first broke, he claimed it was very much with Land Rover’s explicit approval. True or not, the fact that he now says he’s working on the project in Germany, with Mercedes input, suggests that the original plan has changed somewhat.

Co-incidental or deliberate, I’m guessing the fact that there’s a little bit of oblique points scoring via the sponsorship deal won’t have been overlooked by either side.

Read Autocar's review of the Land Rover Defender