How long before Bond gets one?

[Gob]

McLaren's headquarters is meant to impress and intimidate, and it works. Officially, the £300m building was designed by Lord 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 Sixties; in 1981, aged just 34, he took control of the struggling McLaren F1 team and by 1988 he had made it so dominant it won 15 of that year's 16 races. The brilliance that made him sign Lewis Hamilton at just 13 has also made him a personal fortune estimated at £200m, and he still owns 15 per cent of the business.

Now he is leading McLaren on its riskiest venture yet; gambling up to £800m on turning his F1 team into a full-scale supercar maker, a British rival to Ferrari on the road as well as the track. But he's doing it amid a global downturn and tanking sales of high-end cars. Is Ron mad? He says he has no choice.

'There's one really frightening statistic that has been burned into my brain,' he says. 'Since 1966, when we entered F1, 106 teams have come and gone. Only us and Ferrari are still in the pit lane. So staying solely a grand prix team leads to extinction. We need to broaden our business.'

The first in what will be a three-supercar range goes on sale in a year, but McLaren already has 2,500 ' qualified' customers lined up. 'Qualified' means it knows they can easily write the cheque for the £175,000 the 200mph McLaren MP4-12C is likely to cost.

The first 500 or so cars will be built here, inside the MTC, while work is completed on the McLaren Production Centre (MPC), the new £40 million factory being built next door. But don't think for a moment that the cars built in the MPC will be constructed with any less attention to detail than those we're about to see being built under the same roof as Hamilton and Jenson Button's racers. Ron simply wouldn't allow it. His obsession with detail is such that he has already altered the floorplan of the new factory slightly so that his chosen floor tile - plus grouting - will fit without needing to be trimmed.

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

The link is undeniable. The MP4 starts life at another McLaren facility nearby, where the ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre 'monocell' chassis is assembled, and fitted with the aluminium structures to which the engine and suspension will attach.

'It's where the McLaren Formula 1 cars of the Eighties and Nineties were made,' says Foster. 'It's a holy place for us. You can feel Ayrton Senna's ghost in the place.'

The spray-painting booth is the same one used for McLaren's F1 team. All of the car's panels are sprayed together from the same batch of paint to guarantee colour uniformity

Carbon was the only choice for the MP4. A full carbon-fibre structure like this is usually only seen on F1 cars, or hypercars like the Bugatti Veyron. But McLaren's two previous road cars were both made of carbon fibre. The McLaren F1 of the early Nineties was, at the time, the world's fastest, most expensive car and remains arguably the greatest ever made, despite the fact that the recession meant just 107 were built.

The McLaren Mercedes SLR - more than 2,000 examples of which were built in this hall for Mercedes - was the world's best-selling carbon car, but cost at least £300,000. Making a full carbon car profitably at this price will be difficult, but McLaren can't be seen to be going backwards. Every F1 car it has made with Ron at the helm has been carbon fibre.

The body is then brought into the production hall and placed on a stand on castors. 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. Compared to other car factories it is oddly undramatic; no angry-looking orange robots spewing showers of sparks. Instead the MP4 is slowly, painstakingly handmade. Even the noisy air tools are absent; every bolt is tightened by hand with a torque wrench.

'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 F1. Take Metin over there. He used to change Alain Prost's offside front wheel.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive ... z0tKRNG5Bk

[@meric@nwom@n]

Bond went bust, or didn't you hear?

[dales]

Stunning, simply stunning.

PORSCHE........macht schell

[SisterMaryFellatio]

I WANT ONE!!

NOW.....IN THAT COLOUR


SEAN...GET ME ONE...YOUR THE MAN *STAMPING FEET*



Am not holding my breath...hes gonna tell me to sod off