An Insight into
the Supercar Giant McLaren
Nicky Thomas
An extraordinary engineer, designer, inventor, tester and racing driver, Bruce McLaren was an automotive genius. The McLaren Group that today bears his name employs approximately 3,400 people, most of them located at the iconic McLaren Technology Centre headquarters in Woking, Surrey in the UK. The entrepreneurial McLaren Technology Group encompasses McLaren Applied Technologies, McLaren Marketing and of course, McLaren Racing, which has won a total of 182 Formula 1 Grands Prix and 20 Formula 1 World Championships.
McLaren Automotive, which was founded in 2010 and celebrated the production of its 10,000th car in December 2016, now sells its family of Sports Series, Super Series and Ultimate Series products across 30 global markets. Together they form the McLaren Group which, with a combined turnover of £898 million in 2016, is one of the largest privately owned companies in the UK.
I had the opportunity to ask the McLaren Group some questions:
Bruce McLaren was a competitive driver, but the McLaren Racing Team stems from Bruce McLaren’s abilities as an analyst, engineer and manager. How much of the McLaren’s F1 leading technology developments feed into your road cars or other brands of road cars?
6 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.142 DECEMBER 2017
Increasingly the advances in road car development resulting from racing at the highest levels are in processes and systems rather than the direct transfer of individual technologies. Motorsport can serve as a research laboratory for new solutions applied to consumer-oriented cars, but often the relationship between the two is not apparent – learnings from the durability testing of a new system or simulation technology for example, or greater shared understanding of combustion or electrical strategies.
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