Mr Detail

Mind the glass

RON DENNIS can't help himself. His passion for the tiniest detail haunts him even in his sleep. “Sometimes I think I need a brain transplant because I can drive myself absolutely bonkers,” he says. For example, not many car factories are built with glass walls, but that is the material that Mr Dennis chose for McLaren's £300m ($454m) technology centre designed by Norman Foster. Why? “Because glass is either perfect or it's broken. If you have metal panels and somebody bashes into one you have to decide whether to replace it or not. Then if glass is broken it makes this wonderful noise and everyone comes running and everyone knows who did it. The result is that people are careful and the building doesn't have all the dents and scuffs that you usually get and we save money on repairs.”

Few have done more than Mr Dennis to change Formula One, the pinnacle of motorsport, from a cottage industry for enthusiasts into the slickly professional global show of today. The perfectionism that has driven the McLaren Grand Prix team to 10 driver's championships (Lewis Hamilton's in 2008 is the most recent) since Mr Dennis took it over nearly 30 years ago is now being channelled into turning McLaren into a serious maker of sports cars. This week Mr Dennis formally launched McLaren Automotive as a fully fledged carmaker with the debut of the MP4-12C, a £150,000 supercar said to outperform the latest Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

The launch marks a turning point for both Mr Dennis and his firm. Although McLaren has diversified from racing—it has applied-technology and electronic-systems divisions—this is much bigger. He bridles at the suggestion that he wants McLaren to become Britain's answer to Ferrari. But the comparison is inevitable. Both run successful Formula One teams, and McLaren's goal of building a range of up to 5,000 cars a year puts it close to the 7,000 or so Ferraris produced last year. McLaren's existing site can cope with about 1,000 cars a year, but a new factory is going up on the other side of the shimmering lake that helps cool the main building.

The 12C is not McLaren's first sports car. In the early 1990s it developed the extraordinary F1. With a selling price of a $1m and a top speed of 240mph it was the fastest and technically most extreme car ever built for the public highway. But it launched in the depths of a recession; only 103 were ever made.

A decade after the F1 came the Mercedes SLR McLaren, a collaboration with the German carmaker, which took a 40% shareholding in the McLaren Group (making Mr Dennis a very wealthy man) and supplied engines to the Grand Prix team. The SLR was another technical tour de force, with a body built entirely from carbon fibre. With over 2,000 sold it also made a tidy profit. Mr Dennis says working with Mercedes taught him about manufacturing at greater volume. But with its front-mounted engine and blingy looks it was at odds with the “form follows function” approach instilled in McLaren by Mr Dennis and exemplified by the new 12C. A word that Mr Dennis uses frequently is “purity”, something the SLR lacked.

The pursuit of purity led to what Mr Dennis insists was an amicable parting of ways with the Germans last year. They were not comfortable with the prospect of McLaren competing against future high-end Mercedes and they also wanted control of their own F1 team. Mercedes will provide racing engines for McLaren until 2015, but is selling its equity stake. Mr Dennis is currently raising £260m in exchange for 48% of McLaren Automotive (the rest is held by McLaren Group, whose main shareholders are Mr Dennis, his long-term business partner, Mansour Ojjeh, and a Bahraini investment firm).

Last year Mr Dennis left the running of the F1 team to concentrate on the sports car business. The move had been planned, but it came in the aftermath of a scandal in which a rogue McLaren employee had stolen technical information from Ferrari. McLaren was heavily fined and Mr Dennis still feels “acute pain” about the episode and “a deep sense of injustice” over his treatment at the hands of the FIA, the sport's governing body. He says, “What I learned, and my goodness did I learn it, is that the buck stops here.” He will be judged again by the success or failure of McLaren Automotive, and he knows that at 62 he is putting his reputation on the line all over again. That means no respite for some time from all those little details bouncing around in his head.