One of the biggest hitters in car making, the German has worked for Porsche, Ferrari and McLaren. Now he’s set to return to Porsche – to run it.

The task? Steer the company back to success. The golden child for as long as anyone can remember, Porsche has struggled in recent years. It’s still making a lot of money, with an operating profit of just over a billion euros in the first half of this year. But it made three times that in the second half of 2024, and its share value has spent much of the last two years sliding the wrong way. Slow EV uptake, an expensive shift back to combustion engines and disappointing sales in China and US import tariffs have all hurt.

Clearly, Porsche reckons Leiters is the man for the job – he’ll start as CEO on 1 January 2026. And it’ll feel like coming home for both parties. In Leiters’ first stint at Porsche, he helped create the German sports car maker’s first SUV, the controversial Cayenne.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher. If Porsche had screwed that car up, failure would have been hugely expensive and damaging. Fortunately, Leiters nailed it. The Cayenne felt and drove like a proper Porsche, opened the door for the smaller (and equally successful) Macan, and is now fundamental to Porsche’s business model. As Cayenne vice president Michael Schätzle pointed out recently: ‘The Cayenne is the most important model for Porsche. The Cayenne sells 100,000 cars a year in a segment in which you can earn a lot of money, so it’s the most important product for Porsche.’

That result alone was enough to put a halo above Leiters’ head. One by one, the premium and luxury brands – Bentley, Maserati, Lamborghini, Ferrari – were beginning to realise they needed an SUV. And who better to do yours than the guy who’d done Porsche’s?

Ferrari was quickest on the phone, and Leiters started an eight-year shift at Maranello in January 2014. His time in red was 99 per cent solid gold hits. Cars created on his watch include the sensational V8 F8 Tributo, 296 GTB and of course the car he was hired to deliver, the V12 Purosangue SUV. Ferrari floated on the stock market in 2016 and, with Leiters as chief technical officer, the next five years were a rock ’n’ roll streak of soaring share values and sensational cars. The only real bum note was the hard-to-love SF90 Stradale plug-in hybrid.

If his subsequent time at McLaren was a little quieter, that’s no surprise. He didn’t have the time to put in place the same foundations for success, though the W1 hypercar – unveiled on his watch – is pure McLaren, demonstrating Leiters’ ability to adapt effortlessly to every brand he’s worked for.

And Porsche? He knows the brand’s DNA like the back of his hand. Now to replicate the success he’s delivered everywhere else.