Dennis concedes now is not the best time to be launching an expensive new supercar. But he points out the sales targets for the MP4-12C are modest -- just 1000 units in the first full year, or about a three percent share of where the supercar market was in terms of sales back in 2003 -- and that the car won't be fully launched until 2011, by which time the global economy should have recovered somewhat. And although the Mercedes-McLaren SLR program has been fractious one at times - Gordon Murray and his engineers at McLaren repeatedly clashed with their counterparts in Stuttgart during the car's development - Dennis says his company has learned a lot about manufacturing road cars from Mercedes. As I toured through the gleaming white SLR assembly hall at the McLaren Technical Centre, not more than a few hundred feet from the immaculate workshops where the Silver Arrows grand prix racers of Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen are meticulously constructed, the handful of roadsters on the line were surrounded by the exact same system and process paraphernalia you see at Bentley or Rolls-Royce. McLaren built just 100 of the stupendously fast, money-is-no-object McLaren F1s in five years; by the time the last of the 75 Stirling Moss editions rolls off the line this year, it will have built more than 2000 SLRs over the same period. "We know how to build cars now," Dennis says.
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