My Other Car's A Slipper Launch

Former MINI, Ferrari and McLaren designer Frank Stephenson shares his passion for a very special Thames slipper launch

- Hugo Andreae

Frank Stephenson is not your average boat owner. He designs cars for a living. Rather special ones. His CV reads like a roll call of Top Gear’s greatest hits. He designed the infamous wing for the original Ford Escort Cosworth, styled the first X5 for BMW, reinvented the Mini as a 21st century style icon, was poached by Ferrari to oversee the F430, was seconded to Fiat to pen the new 500, moved to McLaren to fashion its latest range of hypercars... the list goes on but you get the gist. In short, he’s arguably the world’s most successful car designer. And yet, what does he choose to drive at the weekend?

A classic Thames slipper launch built for him by the legendary Peter Freebody yard, which he keeps on the river just yards from his home near Henley, Oxfordshire.

For a boy who grew up in Morocco, raced motorcycles as a teenager and spent most of his adult life roaming the world penning 200mph supercars, it seems an oddly sedate choice. And yet for Stephenson the boat provides the perfect antidote to a life lived at breakneck speed, a haven where he can relax with his wife Linda and enjoy the quieter side of life.

Like many boat owners, he grew up with boating in his blood. His father worked for Boeing and when he and his young family were posted to Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, he set about building a boat for them all. Stephenson remembers it only too well.

“It was my first memory of physical pain,” he recalls. “I was 4-5 years old and was sitting under the boat in my father’s workshop. I was looking up at the light through the hole he had made for the shaft to go through when he inadvertently blew the sawdust straight into my eye. I had to go to the hospital for an eyewash!”