The McLaren Technology Center—site of the eponymous Formula 1 team, supercar manufacturer, and Technology Group—is often associated with the descriptor “clinical.” Its flat colors, airport-like architecture, and no-nonsense, efficiency-obsessed engineering departments are all contributors to this atmosphere.
Despite its preoccupation with efficient operation, McLaren’s management saw room for improvement, and announced Sunday that it has further refined its operations with a precise maintenance and break regimen meant to iron out the wrinkles in the facility’s daily routine.
To ease the mobility of personnel around the McLaren campus, staff have been requested to synchronize their steps, and the tiled floor upon which they walk is now measured on a daily basis. If tiles are found to be out of specification, even by a hundredth of a millimeter, they are replaced. To accomplish this, McLaren appears to have devised a tape measure precise enough to measure down to ten thousandths of a meter.
The water feature over which the abstractly kiwi-shaped building lords is probed too, its depth monitored to guarantee that the water level remains sufficient. The aforementioned cutting-edge tape measure is utilized for this purpose too.
Inefficiencies have been trimmed from break times, too. Tea time now incorporates synchronized sips to ensure that teams of employees enter and exit in groups, preventing work delays from out-of-sync break lengths. Even the bodily functions of McLaren personnel is being optimized—the company appears to have deemed the mouth a redundant orifice in the face, and has thus trained its hires to drink through their nose.
The Drive contacted McLaren for further information on the high-tech tape measure, and on whether the nasal drinking training has been given to all under McLaren’s employment, but no response has yet been received.
