Not it’s not a new boy band, or even a man band. Nor is it the line-up for a re-make of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Bunfight at the OK Corral. Nope the Prime Minister, David ‘SpeedCam’ Cameron was at McLaren ordering his new prime ministerial limousine. Well, not quite. He was there to officially open McLaren Automotive’s Foster + Partners-designed McLaren Production Centre.Apart from the new road car production facility, McLaren will have their hands full opening 35 planned global dealerships between now and the end of 2012 while working on the next generation of high-performance cars which will take annual production to 4,500 cars per year by 2014.
They are also currently at work preparing their works and customer GT3 racecar operations for the first full season of competition next year.
The F1 team is already preparing ‘build-work’ on next year’s car, the MP4-27, and has already stored 18,918 individual components from more than 3,000 different works orders and signed off more than 5,500 technical drawings.
And if that’s not enough to be going on with, planning permission has been submitted for the McLaren Applied Technologies Centre while the design of the new McLaren GSK Centre for Applied Performance is already underway.
They are also working with marine competition teams and have entered into a new five-year deal with Specialized for development of the new top-of-the-range S-Works SL4 carbon-fibre road bike.
During the PM’s visit, McLaren Group chairman Ron Dennis: “Through everything we do, McLaren strives to find the solution. We never stop. We exist to go faster; to be state-of-the-art; to innovate; to perform with belief, flair and passion; to be the absolute best at what we do. And everything that McLaren is has been built on the founding principles of good design and solid, seamlessly efficient engineering and manufacturing.”
“I’m delighted that the Government is embracing that initiative too: we need to encourage young people to embrace the STEM subjects, by which I mean, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.”
Now here’s a thought. How about Ron Dennis for PM? Wouldn’t that give Frau Merkel and Monsieur Sarkozy a fright.
