McLaren chalks up half a century

McLaren, one of the biggest names in motorsport and one of the most exclusive in the consumer car market, celebrates its 50th birthday this week.

To mark the milestone, the company threw a 50th anniversary bash for all 2000 staff at its UK headquarters, complete with a motorcade of its most significant cars, including the P1 super-hybrid launched this year.

The event was timed to coincide with the world premiere in London of Rush, the Ron Howard-directed blockbuster documenting the 1976 climax of the rivalry between sometime McLaren driver Niki Lauda and James Hunt, who won that year’s championship in a McLaren M23.

Since the company’s inception, no team in F1 has bettered its 182 victories. Started as Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Limited in September 1963 by the Kiwi wunderkind – he was just 26 at the time – the company has grown from a virtual skunkworks in a tiny workshop in Surrey, England, through a series of ever-larger premises to a highly successful engineering operation employing more than 2000 people at the high-tech McLaren Technology Centre in the Surrey town of Woking.

Along the way, it’s furnished the careers of numerous household-name drivers including Emerson Fittipaldi, James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton.

McLaren didn’t live to see the heights to which his company would rise. He died at the wheel of a CanAm car he was testing at Goodwood Circuit in June 1970. He was 32 years old.

At a series of events this week at its Woking headquarters, the tributes flowed to its founding father from, among others, long-time chairman Ron Dennis and current group CEO Martin Whitmarsh.

"We make no secret of the fact that we are a hugely specialist set of businesses,” Mr Whitmarsh said in the company’s anniversary statement. “But far from that being a limiting factor, our adaptability and determination have made us restless, dynamic and inventive.

“To witness the scope and scale of our growth across the past five decades has been truly astonishing. From our humble beginnings, McLaren has not only become a world-renowned sporting force, but also a byword for superlative technical excellence and attention to detail. That’s an incredible legacy…”

Amid the celebrations, the company deployed its current F1 driving team to shed light on its road car line-up. Sergio Perez turned up in the 3000th MP4-12C to roll off the production line, while Jenson Button rolled by to conclude proceedings in the ready-for-launch P1 plug-in hybrid supercar.

Outside of its natural habitat of F1, McLaren has forged a formidable reputation in US CanAm racing (43 wins, 1967 to 1972), Indy (three Indy 500 wins between 1972 and 1976), and Le Mans, where its legendary F1, the company’s first badged consumer product (if you can apply the term to a $2m supercar) claimed victory in its first go in 1995.

The company’s operations now extend well past just making cars. Its Electronic Systems division now has tech supply deals with every team in F1, NASCAR and Indycar, while its Applied Technologies division works across a raft of disciplines taking in operations in high-end sport, healthcare, energy and industrial design.

Unlike so many of the names it’s competed with in motorsport – Ferrari, Honda, Renault, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota, to name a few – McLaren’s brand has been backed by only the scantest presence in the consumer car market. It’s entrée into road cars was slow, coming three decades after its inception.

But the company met worldwide anticipation of its first such car with the F1, an extraordinary carbon-fibre creation powered by a purpose-designed BMW-made 6.0-litre V12.

At the time of its launch, a 386km/h top speed made the Gordon Murray-designed three-seater the fastest production car ever made. It was also one of the costliest, exceeding $2 million by the time the one or two examples that made it to Australia touched public tar.

Follow-up product was a long time coming. It took until 2011 for the badge to reappear, this time on the MP4-12C coupe and Spider. The 12C resides much closer to the mainstream market than its predecessor, but a starting price of $398K ensures it remains the exclusive preserve of the rich. It’s often mentioned as the closest competitor for Ferrari’s 458 Italia. McLaren also races the 12C in GT3 series.

McLaren has announced an £866K ($A1.47m) entry price for the P1, of which just 375 examples will be made.

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