Yesterday I paid a little trip to McLaren as part of the FOTA Fans’ Forum. I managed to wangle this by suggesting a question to be asked and although I didn’t get to ask it, I was one of the lucky 200 to get inside the McLaren Technology Centre yesterday. It started off with a chance to look at all the cars, dating back to the 1960s through to last year’s car, complete with F-duct and included cars driven by Fittipaldi, Prost, Senna, Lauda, Hakkinen, Raikkonen, Coulthard and of course, Button and Hamilton. There were also 3 McLaren F1 road cars, two of them GT Le Mans cars, one of them worth about £30m. Amazingly, every single car could be seen, touched, looked around and apparently all of them could be topped up with fuel and still driven. One car that was slightly more modern than the older 80s and 90s cars was the new MP4-12C, McLaren’s new road car which was on a fancy revolving platform, doors ajar for people to sit in.
Onto the main event and we got to ask the likes of Martin Whitmarsh, Ross Brawn, Paddy Lowe, Lewis Hamilton and Kamui Kobayashi questions about engines, regulations, privacy, media, overtaking and where Formula One might go to next for a couple of hours. It was great to get such responses to whatever question you wanted to ask and to be able to get such an instant, honest and clear answer.
So basically, an amazing day. The MTC is somewhere that I’ve wanted to go to for ages and to have such an opportunity to see all those legendary cars was a real privilege. Bit of a shame that I couldn’t get more photos myself but McLaren are pretty strict on photography there and I don’t think that I’m going to forget it any time soon.
