McLaren Submits New Factory Plans

McLaren Automotive has confirmed its plans to build a sports car manufacturing plant, as part of the separation process from the McLaren Group. The factory will be built near the existing one in Woking, pistonheads.com reported. Plans for the plant were submitted to the Woking Borough planning department and call for the construction to be raised near the McLaren Technology Center.

"It would be easy enough to consider building McLaren sports cars in existing productive and experienced foreigh factories; a number of which are knocking on our door," McLaren's Ron Dennis was quoted as saying by the aforementioned source. "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."

The facility is designed to build around 20 cars per day, starting with 2011. To do this, McLaren Automotive will employ 800 people. The plans of the factory were drawn by Norman Foster to match the Technical Center building.

"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. 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," added Dennis.

The Woking Borough council will vote on the plans sometimes in July. If it is approved, the world will be one step closer to the unveiling of the company's first car, the already infamous McLaren P11.