McLaren boss: new South Yorkshire factory is nothing to do with Brexit

With McLaren's recent announcement to build a £50m factory in Rotherham to manufacture its carbonfibre chassis, we caught up with boss Mike Flewitt to find out the reasons behind the move.

What's your key reason bringing chassis manufacture in house?

We want to have control of all technologies we believe are core to McLaren - and lightweight composite construction is one of the most important. We still have a good relationship with our Austrian supplier, and we'll keep working with them. They'll build chassis for our existing models and the car we're launching next month at Geneva. But as you've heard, we ultimately expect to be able to make savings of about £10 million a year by buildings our own chassis.

Will this allow you to develop your chassis further?

It will. We've already produced several versions since the original design in the 12C, and we expect to do more. By 2022 we plan to launch 15 all-new cars - the first will be the Geneva car - and half of them will be hybridised. We want to offset the extra weight of a hybrid powertrains with savings elsewhere, and chassis development is going to be an important part of that.

How might the chassis change?

If you look at racing car design, they don't have the front and rear aluminium subframes we currently use in our cars, mainly for refinement purposes. Instead they bolt major components directly into the composite structure. It's hard to imagine us doing that for today's road cars, but our new hybrid powertrains might give us opportunities along those lines.

Does it really matter to keep the weight of your hybrids so low?

We believe it does. I often wish we were in a lightweight race, rather than a power race. Light weight gives you advantages in every area, not just performance, and we'll fight to keep the advantage we already have in this area.

Does this deal have any connection with Brexit?

None whatsoever. We've been looking at doing this for two years and we considered a number of possibilities before deciding on this one. But we're proud of the fact that it will lift British content of our cars to about 58%.