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After 43 years at the top of Formula One, Ron Dennis has left the pit lane to build “the best road-going performance car in the world”. John Arlidge meets him
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT fast cars and fancy names. Formula One drivers have the kind of monikers that sound fast. You can almost hear the whine of a V8 F1 engine when you say Ayrton Senna, Giancarlo Fisichella or Mika Hakkinen. The same goes for supercar makers – names like Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini conjure up Italian style and high performance. So what are we to make of a man simply called Ron, who claims he is building the best supercar in the word, in a small English town called Woking? Quite a lot, it turns out, because the Ron in question is Ron Dennis.
Dennis, 62, is the longest-serving and most successful team manager in F1 history. Over 43 years, his teams have won 163 Grands Prix, eight F1 Constructors’ titles, and 12 F1 World Drivers’ Championships. He’s worked with Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Mika Hakkinen and Niki Lauda, and nurtured Lewis Hamilton from a promising kart driver to the youngest-ever F1 champion. But he quit the pit lane earlier this year to pursue his latest dream – he is investing a large chunk of his own fortune into a new company, McLaren Automotive, that he believes will create the best sports car in the world. “It has an iconic design like the E-Type Jaguar and, on all performance parameters and price, is targeted to be better than our competition,” he says.
The MP4-12C – the letters and numbers are an amalgam of the project’s codename and the various companies Dennis created in his years in F1 – is a small, wedge-shaped two-seater with a high-revving, seven-speed V8 engine with F1-fast gear changes, a wafer-thin but stronger-than-steel carbon-fibre chassis and “gullwing” doors that open upwards, not outwards. The design team is led by former Ferrari design director Frank Stephenson, who also created the Maserati MC12.
Under the skin, Dennis’s team has used F1-style technical expertise to achieve a number of “firsts”. The MP4-12C boasts automatic variable suspension – the electronically controlled suspension is designed “to prevent the jaw-jarring experience you get in most sports cars if you hit a pot hole at low speeds”, Dennis says. As the car accelerates, however, the suspension automatically stiffens to create a thrilling – and safe – ride.
The car also boasts leading-edge communications technology. Park it next to your house and you can use wireless internet to download mp3 music files, telephone numbers, email addresses and Google maps from your computer to the car’s computer. Horsepower for horsepower, it also emits the smallest amount of carbon dioxide of any car on the market.
There are some neat design features, too. Sit in the driving seat and the dashboard seems to “float” in front of you, rather than being fixed to the windscreen. Because the engine and the transmission sit behind you, there is no central drive shaft separating the driver and passenger. “It’s much bigger on the inside than the exterior would suggest,” says Dennis, proudly unveiling the car at McLaren’s Norman Foster-designed headquarters, a few miles west of London.
The car, which will go on sale in 2011 at around £150,000 (BD 92,360), has been made possible thanks to investment from Bahrain. Mumtalakat, the private equity arm of the Bahrain government, owns 50 percent of McLaren Automotive. Mumtalakat’s multi-million-dollar investment follows its decision two years ago to buy a 30 percent stake in McLaren Group, which controls the F1 racing team. Mumtalakat invested in McLaren after Dennis met the Crown Prince of Bahrain, His Highness Shaikh Salman Bin Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa, at the inaugural Bahrain Grand Prix in 2004.
Dennis, who owns 25 percent of McLaren Automotive, with the remaining 25 percent in the hands of Swiss technology firm TAG, says: “I’m privileged to have such a close relationship with many senior people in Bahrain. Whatever they do, they do with a commitment to excellence.”
Talal Al-Zain, CEO of Mumtalakat, insists it is the right time to invest in the car industry, in spite of the recession. “Yes, these are bad times, but it would be crazy for us to say, ‘There is a downturn now, so let’s not do anything’,” he says. “I want a product that’s ready for when growth and wealth return.”
Dennis agrees, arguing that the supercar sector has not been as badly affected by the downturn as the car market overall and will be the first to pick up. “There were 125,000 cars in our segment of the market sold in 2007. It’s shrunk but not by the kind of drop we’ve seen in other sectors,” he says. “We anticipate it will be back above 100,000 in two years’ time.”
By 2011, he believes sales will be so strong he will be able to go on from the MP4-12C and create a stable of thoroughbred English sports cars. “We are building more than a car, we’re building a brand.” While the MP4-12C is designed to compete with the likes of the Ferrari F430 and the Lamborghini Gallardo, two new two-seaters, one smaller to go nose to nose with the Porsche 911, one bigger to compete with the Porsche Carrera GT, will be launched by 2015. The initial production target is 1,000 cars in the first year, rising to 4,000 a year as new models are introduced.
Dennis and his partners have already invested millions into the project and are close to announcing a further £300m (BD 185m) investment, part of which will fund the construction of a new factory alongside McLaren’s headquarters.
One reason Mumtalakat invested in McLaren Automotive is that Dennis has experience in the supercar sector. In the 1990s he developed the McLaren F1, in its day the fastest road car with a top speed of 240 mph. Only 107 were made and they now change hands for £2.5m (BD 1.5m). Six years ago, McLaren teamed up with Mercedes-Benz, which supplies the engines for McLaren’s F1 cars, to build the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. McLaren is currently ending production of the SLR with a £500,000 (BD 308,000) limited edition: the Stirling Moss. All 75 have been sold, mainly to customers in the Gulf where the weather suits the car.
“I’ve built the best supercar before,” Dennis says with a smile. “Now, with the help of my partners in Bahrain, we’re determined to do it again.”
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