McLaren apply for consent for new road car facility

[John S]

McLaren Automotive, a division of the McLaren Group that includes the Formula One team, yesterday applied for planning permission to build a new facility alongside the ‘Technology Centre’ in Woking to produce 20 McLaren road cars per day.

The proposed ‘McLaren Production Centre’ would create 800 new jobs and is being pushed forward by former team boss Ron Dennis who is now focussed on the car division of the firm.

“Ever since we revealed the McLaren F1 sports car in 1992, it has been a long-held dream of mine to launch a McLaren sports car company,” said Dennis. “Designing, developing and selling globally the best sports cars in the world is just half of that equation; building them to previously un-matched levels of quality, with ground-breaking technologies in a production facility in the UK is key to satisfying that dream. I believe that if the McLaren Production Centre is given the go ahead, it will be an engineering centre of excellence of which McLaren and the UK can be proud.”

Dennis is keen to ensure that the manufacturing takes place in the UK and not overseas with the first cars scheduled for delivery in 2011.

“It would be easy enough to consider building McLaren sports cars in existing productive and experienced foreign factories; a number of which are knocking on our door,” Dennis continued. “However, McLaren is a great British company founded over 40 years ago that should, in my view, continue to design and build our own products.”

A decision on the planning submission is expected from the council at the end of July.

Earl ALEXANDER
© CAPSIS International

[Jericoke]

That's fantastic!