Nicholas Faith: Britain's got (industrial) talent

The fact that Britain is so attractive for direct investment in engineering must be a tribute to Brits' native intelligence

Sebastian Vettel's triumph in this year's Formula One Championship is obviously a bitter blow to two great British drivers. But it constituted yet another triumph for British engineering.

Like all the major contenders in F1 – apart from Ferrari – his Red Bull car was produced in Britain. Indeed the route of the M40 motorway north of Oxford towards Birmingham constitutes a sort of vroom-vroom valley, housing as it does seven major teams including Mercedes and Renault. And when Red Bull's owner, Dietrich Mateschitz, tried to take the team to his base in Austria, the crucial technical team would not budge from Warwickshire.

Our successes in Formula One are no accident, merely the tip of an increasingly successful iceberg. We now produce more cars than at any time over the past 40 years, and export four out of five of them. Moreover Britain can now offer a wider range of cars than any country in the world – even Germany cannot boast a Range Rover or an Aston Martin – an advantage notably not shared by other major car producers in Europe like France and Italy.

The rebirth of what once appeared to be a doomed industry came in 1986 when Nissan arrived in Sunderland and proved that Britain could make reliable cars efficiently. Nissan was soon joined by Toyota and Honda, the other two giants of the Japanese motor industry. The general transformation of worker attitudes they induced was dramatically illustrated a couple of years ago when General Motors evaluated all its European plants and found, to everyone's surprise, that the Vauxhall factory at Halewood on Merseyside – historically a byword for industrial unrest –was more productive than a couple of similar factories in Germany.

You will have noticed that all these brands are foreign-owned; there are only two British-owned manufacturers, the valiant Morgan and Manganese Bronze, which makes London's taxis. But then there are only two major British-owned engineering firms, Rolls-Royce and poor BAE, suffering so badly from over-dependence on defence production. The others are from all over the world, the US, of course, but also France, Germany, Japan and India.

The Indian billionaire Ratan Tata is the biggest industrial employer in the country, having built up his business here from an unlikely initial investment in Tetley Tea. But he now also owns the fabulously successful Jaguar Land Rover, as well as Corus, originally British Steel. And such is our attraction as a manufacturing base that when Tata shut down steelmaking on Teesside a firm from Thailand, yes Thailand, came to the rescue and reopened the plant. These foreigners are crucial, not just for the people they employ directly, but for the multiplier effect of the components and services they buy from hundreds of small British-owned firms.

Probably the most remarkable story is that of the American General Electric. When its chairman, Jack Welch, bought Amersham, the formerly state-owned medical engineering firm based in the leafy town of Chalfont St Giles, he made it the global headquarters of GE's medical business, which now sells $17bn worth of kit a year. Even Siemens, so abused after winning a major contract for new trains, employs several thousand in manufacturing here. Indeed it supplies the software for Vettel's cars, and hopes to build a major factory in Hull making wind turbines.

Given the lamentable British record in educating the mass of its children, above all in the unjustly derided discipline of engineering, the fact that Britain is so attractive for direct investment in engineering must be a tribute to the native intelligence, ingenuity and inquiring attitude of so many Brits of all classes and, post-Thatcher, their willingness to work harder for longer hours and with fewer holidays than their European equivalents. In time, we might even be able to develop a few major engineering companies of our own, and not rely on Rolls-Royce as our lonely flagship.