McLaren drives resurgence of British manufacturing "If this becomes a building block along with some of the other elite companies you've got in the UK, as a resurgence for our domestic manufacturing base to grow, then there can be no better story than that," says Alan Foster, operations director at McLaren Automotive. There's only so much services, marketing you can do. Selling products is a core belief of mine and doing it excellently is almost a given. We do clever things here but you've got British Aerospace [BAE Systems], you've got Bentley, lots of other people, which is all good for the balance of payments. 80pc of what we make here goes abroad," he adds. McLaren Automotive has close to 50 dealers around the world, and will be selling cars in China from May. Foster says the path of expansion will be trod carefully. There's kind of a wishlist of countries we will get into. Don't shoot for the moon and miss, shoot and make sure you hit the target. We don't compete to come second," he says. The production centre serves as a showroom as well as a factory, with prospective customers getting a tour of operations and able to make bespoke selections from colour to wheels, leather work, stitching and so on. The most popular colour among customers currently is Volcano Red. So if you go back four, five years, just before we went into recession everybody was on a high, every car you looked at was silver. Silver invokes an emotion of wealth and satisfaction. What you're seeing now is rich, luscious, comforting colours coming back in again. So you're seeing the reds come in, the blues, really rich comforting colours. And if people's mentality switches to austerity you'll see the greys and blacks come back in. Not that you can imagine anyone in the market for a McLaren having either recession or austerity at the forefront of their minds. The road car business has ambitions for growth but not mass volume. I can't perceive a situation where we will become a scale of a Ford Motor Company, or a General Motors or a Toyota where we're doing millions of cars a year. That's not what we're about," says Foster. McLaren is not just about cars either. The group as a whole is bound by heritage and transferral of skills, with the F1 team capturing its competitive spirit. It is a strategy which has paid off , with results filed at Companies House last month showing McLaren's pre-tax profit jumped to £19.7m last year from £12m in 2010. Profitability was boosted by McLaren's Applied Technologies business, which takes the technological and design expertise of the group and applies it to other areas, including elite sports and health care. MAT provided equipment and training programme support for Team GB. Following a few early years of exploratory projects to see how what is now 50 years of racing heritage and investment could be applied elsewhere, the newest member of the McLaren family is established in its own right. One-off projects have led to five-year partnerships in some cases. The last three years we've used to establish ourselves. And now the challenge is to scale that, rather than do more and go into new markets, let's do what dare I say British companies don't have the best reputation of doing, and that's scale, focus on something that really will grow," says Geoff McGrath the managing director of McLaren Applied Technologies. Mark Cavendish won the Tour de France's green points jersey riding the S-Works + McLaren Venge road bike, created by bike manufacturer Specialized and MAT. That collaboration has turned into a long-term partnership. "It's the first bike to be designed in this way, with a Formula One team, using techniques that initially had not been made available...It fulfils all our criteria of what makes a good project: it's something you can be proud of, it's pioneering, but more than that it's become a business," says McGrath. He says the potential for the business is "really significant," so much so that there are plans for a new building, the McLaren Applied Technologies centre, which could create up to 300 jobs. Currently MAT employs around 40 people, taken mainly from racing but other areas too, including gaming. GlaxoSmithKline is one company working in partnership with MAT to improve manufacturing performance, consumer healthcare and drug research and development. We're a good example of an engineering start-up that can be creative, show entrepreneurial flair and succeed. We often criticise ourselves for this in this country and I actually think we can do it, it's just a question of belief," McGrath says. Among the work MAT has done for GSK is increased efficiency in the manufacturing of toothpaste, by increasing the speed in which workers are able to swap over products from one flavour to another on production line. McGrath says the McLaren team used the analogy of the F1 pit change to inspire GSK staff. It's a routine operation. It's a drill that you need to practice, to hone and perfect and that's what we have in the pit lane which a lot of people can relate to. Back in Automotive, Foster says McLaren chairman Ron Dennis has created a cultural and behavioural legacy which is passed throughout the group and beyond. Ron is very demanding, he will fully admit he is quite obsessive and he is very demanding, but he's very paternalistic. I won't call him a grandfather but he is like your father. He will scold you, and he will commend you, and support you and advise you, and sometimes he'll let you have your own head and then come and pick the pieces up afterwards. It's the only way you were going to learn.