The family owner of Kulpsville plastics maker hopes a big racing deal boosts its rep
Montgomery County manufacturer Greene Tweed, a family-owned military and industrial supplier since 1863, seeks to up its profile with a Formula One racing deal.
A family-owned Montgomery County manufacturer that’s been supplying hardware parts and seals for U.S. military vehicles and others since the Civil War hopes to raise its public profile as a new sponsor of U.K.-based sports carmaker McLaren’s pro auto racing teams.
Greene Tweed & Co., which employs 2,000 at its Kulpsville factory and labs, its Lansdale offices, and plants in Texas, England, Switzerland, Korea, and Taiwan, has inked a multiyear deal to support McLaren’s Formula One and Arrow McLaren IndyCar teams.
Greene Tweed’s blue logo will go on McLaren race cars, and its engineers will work with the race teams “exploring design, manufacturing, and delivery of high-performance and resilient materials,” the companies said Thursday. Terms weren’t disclosed.
Greene Tweed has been a McLaren supplier for the past four years. As with other customers, “we engineer the toughest parts — thermoplastics, elastomers, composites“ for missions that “can’t fail,” said Allon Bloch, the chairman.
That company’s expertise “strongly aligns” with McLaren’s need for high performance and steady, incremental improvements, Zak Brown, chief executive of McLaren Racing, said in a statement.
Other users of Greene Tweed parts have included NASA, SpaceX, Gulfstream, and Boeing, along with computer, energy, chemical, drug, and other companies.
The company competes against — and also sometimes supplies — units of larger, diversified multinationals including DuPont Co. of Wilmington and TE Connectivity of Berwyn. Products include Xycomp light composites for aircraft, Chemraz seals that resist high heat, Arlon fuel-cell components, Orthotek carbon composites for X-ray markers and other medical uses, and Seal-Connect O-rings.
Formula One’s audience has more than doubled to over a million viewers per race since 2016, when it was purchased from private-equity investors by billionaire John C. Malone’s Liberty Media, the company that also controls West Chester-based QVC.
Formula One fans “are affluent and international,” including executives and bankers “in London, Sydney, Dubai,” and other world finance and business centers, said Michael Schreiber, founder and chairman of Playfly Sports, a sponsorship consultant based in Berwyn and a partner in sports investment firm SeventySix Capital.
“It’s like world soccer, not like the NFL, which is mostly U.S.,” he added. “If they want to do deals, the people they want to deal with will be seeing their name, every race.”
Formula One, with its fast acceleration, ESPN contract, and featured role in Netflix’s Drive to Survive series last year won slightly more viewers per race than rival IndyCar and is gaining on industry leader NASCAR, which has fewer viewers than it did before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data collected by SportsPro, a U.K.-based media analyst.
Besides its racing teams, featuring specialized cars that can cost millions to build, McLaren also makes street-ready sports cars with prices starting at over $200,000. The local dealer is on West Chester Pike in Chester County.
Greene Tweed was founded in 1863 in New York. “They made buggy parts, furnace, timers, door knobs, braided packings” and a line of industrial seals to keep high-pressure gases in engines, Bloch said.
The company moved operations to Montgomery County after 1900 to be close to an asbestos supplier in North Wales. In 1940 it was purchased by Max Delfiner, an Austrian who had developed a silk factory and a department store in Paris but emigrated to New York when the Nazis invaded.
“In the 1960s we got a call from the Air Force that our seals would be excellent for jet landing gear,” Bloch said, recounting company and family lore. “We said, ‘Thanks, but there’s too much risk.’ The Air Force said, ‘We’re not asking.’” Landing gear became a major product.
More recently the company diversified into high-temperature polyetherketone materials, useful in drilling far underground, among other applications, and developed lines of fluorinated plastics that can be built in complex shapes that hold their forms at extreme temperatures.
Bloch, Delfiner’s great-grandson, was recruited to the company from Boston, where he had worked for Motorola, by his uncles when they began planning for retirement. He said banker Ben Persofsky, at Brown Brothers Harriman’s Philadelphia office, is helping with long-term planning.