Building the future
2010 will see a new chapter at the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC). Directly opposite our main building, we’re creating a McLaren Production Centre (MPC) where our MP4-12Cs will be built.
This bespoke, state-of-the-art facility has been designed by the architects Foster + Partners to the same ‘form follows function’ ethos as the MTC. As with the car that will be built within its walls, we had the freedom of a blank sheet of paper.
Connecting expertise
The teams within the MTC are within a short walking distance of each other, which is essential for the uninterrupted flow of ideas. The MPC has been designed to allow the same fluid team work, not only within the building, but between the buildings as well. Connected by a subterranean walkway, production engineers in the MPC will be just a ten-minute walk from the design and engineering teams in the MTC, ensuring communication and ideas are unobstructed.
From the ground up
As with the MTC, we have created a building that sits seamlessly within its environment. Thanks to its intelligent design, the MPC appears to stand less than 6m tall and no wider than 100m from the outside. Yet below ground the rest of its 32,000 sq m houses all the parts, components and the paint shop. We even considered the position of the building, rotating it 90 degrees in order to minimise the soil displaced by its construction, which is being used to landscape the grounds surrounding the MPC.
Built for quality and efficiency
One of the challenges for the MPC was to design a facility that allows us to build cars to the same hand-built quality standards as we did for the McLaren F1 and Mercedes McLaren SLR, but more efficiently and on a much larger scale. We’ve taken principles from large-scale production operations, combined them with our experience of hand-building super sports cars at the MTC, and have created an environment, processes and new technology that allow us to build the MP4-12C with our trademark craftsmanship and attention to detail.