McLaren Technology Centre - The PH Tour

PH prize-winners get the VIP treatment courtesy of McLaren Automotive (w/video)

Guess how many people get invited inside the F1 'mission control' room at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking? Yep, pretty much no-one - ever!

The same goes for McLaren's F1 wind tunnel, and the team's dynamic test rig that can mimic the F1 car's performance on circuits around the world (even while the race is on, if necessary), and the F1 construction workshop, where racing car chassis are painstakingly put together using bits of carbon composite snipped off rolls that cost an eye-watering £10,000 a pop.

In fact, unless you're on the McLaren payroll, or maybe big friends with Ron Dennis, the gates to the Woking Technical Centre tend to stay firmly shut. Which is a shame, because the Norman Foster designed MTC is probably one of the most jaw-droppingly impressive centres of automotive excellence you'll (maybe never) get to see anywhere.

So the 10 winners of the most highly-subscribed PistonHeads competition in our website's history are part of a pretty exclusive club, having just been treated to one of the most comprehensive VIP tours of the facility that McLaren has ever allowed.

The big PH prize-winners' day out was organised by McLaren Automotive, and culminated in an amazing chance to meet the company's design director Frank Stephenson, who not only presented the latest MP4 12C validation prototype in depth, but hung around to chat about it at length with our guys over lunch.

The day started early with coffee and croissants, followed by a guided tour of some of the highlights parked up in MTC's 'boulevard' mezzanine, amazingly encompassing the first racing car built by Bruce McLaren when in his early teens in New Zealand - a modified Austin 7 - right up to last year's F1 car.

In between, we saw the M80 Can Am car from 1970 raced by Denny Hulme, (the sister car to that which took Bruce McLaren's life in a testing accident), and variations on the MP4 theme including historic cars from the F1 turbo era raced by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.

Our band of PH tourists also got presentations on the innovative MP4-12C chassis - including its carbon chassis construction, unique suspension configuration and body, as well an overview of the new assembly facility currently under construction, where the hand-built production process will mirror that currently being perfected in the MTC itself.

Then followed the headline presentation from Frank Stephenson, who unveiled McLaren's latest version of the 12C and gave us a detailed 'nose-to-tail' insight into how the company's design and engineering teams collaborated on the stunning machine's design.

It was fascinating stuff, and we'll have more on that next week, but meanwhile you can get a feel for the amazingly generous lengths McLaren went to for the benefit of our prize-winners via these pictures and video of the event.

So on behalf of our prize-winners and the whole PH community at large, we'd like to extend a heartfelt 'thank you' to all the kind folk at McLaren who made it such a day to remember - and remember it we will!

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j3ffers

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