Making the 2011 McLaren MP4-12C

Any resemblance between the McLaren Technology Center (MTC) and the lair of a villain in a James Bond movie is entirely intentional. The MTC looks like it ought to be on some remote tropical island, but it's actually in Woking, England, southwest of London. You can't see it from the road, but the really important visitors — drivers, shareholders, sponsors and customers — all arrive by jet or helicopter, admiring the yin-yang symbol formed by the building and its adjacent lake from above. Once they land nearby, they're whisked to the main building by a fleet of black Mercedes R-Class vans with blacked-out windows.

If you're very important, your car might follow the road that skirts the lake and drop you at the main entrance. If you've driven yourself, you'll enter through one of the circular silver pods in the parking lot, descending to an eerily empty underground corridor with the walls stenciled with space-age text as if it were straight from a Stanley Kubrick film set. Another elevator at the far end takes you back up to the "boulevard," where you're likely to encounter your first human being since the guy at the front gate.

This is the spine of the McLaren Technology Center, a vast complex of 57,000 square feet opened in 2004 for McLaren's 1,000 employees. You pass a trophy case 25 yards long and a phalanx of historic racing cars, the legacy of nearly half a century at the pinnacle of motorsport, and you're in the place where the 2011 McLaren MP4-12C comes from. If you're looking for a place that crackles with the pure energy of automotive art and science, you'll find it here.

Welcome to Spaceship Ron
The MTC is meant to impress and intimidate, and it works. Officially, the $750 million building was designed by Lord Norman Foster, but everyone knows that it was really the work of McLaren's own Bond villain, the terrifying and infamously detail-obsessed Ron Dennis. Dennis started as an F1 mechanic in the late 1960s and managed to gain control of the struggling McLaren Formula 1 racing team in 1981, when he was just 34. By 1988, Dennis had made McLaren a dominant force in F1, which it's been for the last two decades — not just for its success but also for its relentless spirit of innovation and quality.

Now he is leading McLaren on its riskiest venture yet, a $1.2 billion gamble that will turn his Formula 1 team into a full-scale supercar maker, a British rival to Ferrari on the road as well as the track. But Dennis is unfortunately forced to accomplish this amidst a global economic downturn, when the sales of high-end cars are in the tank. His decision has even led to a divorce from Mercedes, McLaren's biggest shareholder.

Is Ron mad? He says he has no choice. "There's one really frightening statistic that has been burned into my brain," Dennis says. "Since 1966, when we entered Formula 1, 106 F1 teams have come and gone. Only we and Ferrari are still in the pit lane. So staying solely and exclusively a Formula 1 team leads to extinction. We need to broaden our business."

The MP4-12C Plan
The 2011 McLaren MP4-12C is the first in what will be a range of three supercars, and McLaren already has 2,700 "qualified" customers lined up for the car's introduction next year. In this case, "qualified" means the ability to write a $250,000 check for the 200-mph supercar.

No angry-looking robots spewing sparks; instead the MP4 is slowly and painstakingly made by hand.

The first 500 or so cars will be built here, inside the MTC, while work is completed on the McLaren Production Center (MPC), a $60-million factory with 345,000 square feet of floor space being built next door. But don't think for a moment that the cars built in the new factory will be constructed with any less attention to detail than those we're about to see being built under the same roof as the F1 racers of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton. Ron Dennis simply wouldn't allow it. His obsession with detail is such that he has already altered the floor plan of the new factory slightly so that his chosen tile flooring will fit without any needing to be trimmed.

Alan Foster is McLaren's genial operations director. He had 30 years of experience in building cars for some of the world's biggest carmakers before being hired by McLaren. Supercars might be beautiful and desirable but they're often surprisingly shoddy in the way they're made. Dennis is demanding a car that is as exciting as a Ferrari but as boringly reliable as a Toyota.

Into the Factory
Foster waves his security pass at a card reader and a pair of double frosted-glass doors sigh open like something from Star Trek, admitting us from the boulevard into the McLaren MP4-12C "factory." It's unlike any other car factory we've been in. It's small — about the size of three basketball courts — and almost entirely silent, and the tiled white floor is surgically clean. "Forget eating your dinner off this floor," says Foster. "I'd be happy for you to operate on me in here."

Ron Dennis' obsession with cleanliness means most of the MPC's walls are glass, but those around this room are frosted because until recently the cars being made in here were prototypes and still secret. "We're going to crash that green one as soon as we've finished it, and the black car is for Ron and the other directors to test," explains Foster.

We have been granted very early access to this facility; not least, we suspect, because McLaren wants to communicate the close links between its F1 cars and its road cars, its main selling point over its rivals. The link is undeniable. The 2011 McLaren MP4-12C starts life at another McLaren facility nearby, where the ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber "monocell" chassis is assembled and then fitted with the aluminium structures to which the engine and suspension will attach, and then it is built up here.

"This is the place where the McLaren Formula 1 cars of the 1980s and 1990s were made," says Foster. "It's a holy place for us. You can feel Ayrton Senna's ghost in the place. I had to persuade Ron to let me use it, and he only gave me permission if I promised on pain of death to give it back in perfect condition when we move into the new factory."

Premium Construction
A full carbon-fiber structure like this is usually only seen on F1 cars, yet the two previous McLaren-built road cars have been built from the high-tech plastic stuff. The $1 million 1993 McLaren F1 was the world's fastest, most expensive supercar of its time, though it was not, strictly speaking, a commercial success because it was launched into the teeth of a recession and just 107 were built. The price tag of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren also exceeded $1 million and it struggled to find its audience, though eventually 2,114 examples were built from 2004-'10.

Once assembled, the basic body is brought into the production hall and placed on a rolling stand. There's no production line; the cars are just pushed between workstations where two or three technicians fit another helping of beautifully tooled and very expensive components, much in the fashion that hand-built cars have always been put together. Compared to automated car factories, the McLaren process is oddly undramatic: no angry-looking orange robots spewing showers of sparks. Instead, the 2011 McLaren MP4-12C is slowly and painstakingly made by hand. Even the air tools are disdained because every bolt is tightened by hand with a torque wrench and marked with a blob of paint to certify its placement, just as on a racing car.

"If you keep everything calm and quiet, people can concentrate harder on their work," says Foster. "This is the way these guys are used to working. Nobody here has less than five years experience with McLaren, and most of them started in Formula 1. Take Metin over there. He used to change Alain Prost's left front wheel. When we bring our most valued customers in here for a tour, they just get it straight away. Of the potential buyers we've shown around, 98 percent have immediately ordered a car."

The OCD Factor
Stripped naked, you can see the details that McLaren hopes will give the MP4-12C an edge over its German and Italian rivals. An automotive battery is usually a heavy, awkward thing, but the MP4-12C's battery is astonishingly light because it uses the same lithium-ion technology as your laptop or mobile phone. It saves 26 pounds, a massive amount in supercar terms. As Ron Dennis says, "We're all about the grams."

Indeed McLaren seems to have missed no opportunity to shave weight. Foster points to the McLaren logo stamped into the lightweight aluminium beam that will support the dashboard. "In the original design that logo was raised, but we realized that by embossing it instead we could save 2.4 grams. So we did."

It's this kind of obsessive attention to detail that could make the 2011 McLaren MP4-12C the kind of supercar that will change the car business, but it also makes Ron Dennis terrifying to work for. There are no post-it notes in the MPC, a desk might have only one item on its surface at a time, and employees are forbidden from wearing denim. Ron Dennis even designed the typeface used throughout the MPC.

We ask Foster about other urban myths relating to Ron Dennis. Is it true that he redesigned the soap dispensers in the toilets so they wouldn't drip? "Yes, I believe he did," Foster responds. Did he order one of his more hirsute employees to shave twice a day? "Yes. That was a guy who worked for me, actually."

And is it true that he once interrupted a meeting when he spotted a flock of birds that had been defecating on his beloved glass walls, rang his maintenance team and screamed, "I thought I told you to shoot those f***ing geese!"

Foster shakes his head: "That one will have to stay an urban myth, I'm afraid."

The Business Plan
It will take all of Ron Dennis' iron will to turn McLaren into a credible rival to Ferrari. Having expanded sixfold since 2000, the market for supercars costing over $150,000 contracted almost overnight when the credit crunch hit. Global sales of such supercars are estimated to have declined 38 percent in 2009. Ferrari did better than most, as its sales dropped only 5 percent to 6,250 cars last year, but without the launch of the sensational new California, its numbers would have looked much gloomier. Meanwhile, Aston Martin fared much worse; 7,000 cars were sold in 2007, but the total slumped to 4,000 in 2009 and one third of its workforce had to be laid off.

Dennis plans to sell up to 4,000 McLarens each year, and seems unfazed by the challenge. "A lot of small car companies have come and gone and we're not going to be one of them," he says. "There will inevitably be resurgence and we intend to catch that wave. We've been able to push down dramatically the cost of the new factory. We couldn't have had a better environment to do business in. We said to our suppliers, 'Don't bother looking at us as a profit opportunity; look at us as a bridge to survival.'

"So I don't see this difficult environment as anything other than an opportunity. Given the circumstances, true profitability is four or five years off, but we have a lean program and we're only targeting 4 percent of the market. Those are conservative numbers, and I think we're being realistic."

Those 2,700 qualified customers with intentions to purchase the 2011 McLaren MP4-12C will mean the waiting list to get a car could be two years long once the first deliveries start next spring. But two customers are unlikely to have to wait that long. Foster says McLaren F1 drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton have already used McLaren's online car configuration tool to specify their MP4s. He won't say what colors and options they've chosen, only that they're surprisingly tasteful.

Both drivers joined Ron Dennis at a press conference at the MTC to reveal the final version of the MP4 to 300 journalists from around the world. They'd just got back from testing two prototypes at the Goodwood race circuit in Sussex. Given how much their employer has riding on this car, it's no surprise that they loved it. "I was disappointed you couldn't choose chrome rims," said Hamilton. "Do we get to keep them?"

"No," replied Ron Dennis. "But if you win races and world championships, you might just get a new one each year."

Portions of this content have appeared in foreign print media and are reproduced with permission.