Best of British: McLaren

Posted on November 30th, 2011

Welcome to British Brands in focus. We’re extremely proud to be a British manufacturer and as such we would like to celebrate British manufacture by focusing on one our favourite British brands each month. This month we’re taking a closer look at McLaren. If you didn’t catch the TV show about McLaren last week, as part of the BBC’s ‘How to Build…’ series, you can catch it for the next 6 days on their watch again service. We were completely blown away by it!

The program was essentially about the production of the McLaren MP4-12C, a super-car with Formula One heritage.

We’ve all watched programs like Top Gear and seen cars like the McLaren compared to other super cars, sometimes cars produced in a small workshop by engineers. To the layman, these cars are comparable. They almost all look beautiful and go like a scalded cat. However, when you at the design and manufacturing process behind McLaren’s cars, you realise that this company has a setup that no small workshop could ever hope to compete with.

The first thing in the BBC show that left us with our jaws on the floor was the Mclaren Development Centre, a purpose built facility designed for the pursuit of perfection. From the white corridor leading to a single lift (designed to clear your mind as you enter), to the endless glass facade looking out over a lake. Not to mention the Formula one cars parked inside the building. Talk about inspirational!

The cars themselves are constructed in a factory. But this is like no factory you’ve seen before. Row upon row of super cars at various build states, parked nose to tail in an environment so clean and clinical that it would put a hospital to shame.

Every single aspect of the car is designed to obsessively high standards. From the carbon fibre ‘MonoCell’ at the heart of the car to the unmatched perfection of its paintwork.

McLaren can now work to tolerances of 1000th of a mm for their entire body shell. No ill-fitting panels or bits dropping off here!

They have teams driving one of their cars around a track around the clock to reveal any problems that might occur through prolonged use. They have a guy who’s job is to design the exhaust note of the car. The body design started as a sketch, moved to CAD and then full size clay models to ensure the perfect shape.

McLaren have built a brand new production facility to enable them to produce 4000 MP4-12Cs per year whilst maintaining this incredible quality and attention to detail. This state of the art manufacturing facility has been designed in such a way that they can change the layout completely with just a couple of days’ notice.

You might expect that trying to manufacture a large number of super cars at such obsessive quality, that McLaren would keep the options to a minimum… Not so, head over to their web site and have a play with the vehicle configurator. There’s more options that you can get on a Mini!

Keep up the good work McLaren, you truly are an inspiration to British manufacturers.