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The first indication that Mc-Laren is a different kind of car company is not Ron Dennis’s legendary attention to detail (although the company’s executive chairman is said to feel that your gardenvariety obsessive compulsive is a bit lax in his orderliness).

Nor is it in the sheen that encompasses virtually every square inch of McLaren’s Woking Technology Centre – even the bays where the Formula One race cars are disassembled and serviced are cleaner than my kitchen.

Or even the incredibly wellequipped gym where all the staff, drivers and mechanics work out (though, to be honest, the little custom-made TechnoGym weight machine that uses a steering wheel and neck harness to strengthen Jenson Button’s and Lewis Hamilton’s wrists and shoulder muscles does seem a little over the top).

Nope, the real twist is the gallery of trophies (613 in all) – representing race wins, manufacturer’s titles, driver’s championships, etc. – that cram two impossibly long open-glass cabinets on the facility’s ground floor. And, just in case anyone still doesn’t get that Ron Dennis is, shall we say, meticulous (not to mention a great motivator), those trophy shelves ring the exit of the incredibly well-stocked cafeteria where all 1,800 of the company’s employees chow down. Call it pride or call it pressure, but McLaren employees are reminded every day of the incredible legacy they are expected to continue.

Not that this tough love is anything new to McLaren. Long before the F1 manufacturer was even a twinkle in Ron Dennis’s eye, Bruce McLaren (team founder and namesake) was a 13-year-old Kiwi who inherited an eventhen-ancient 1929 Austin Ulster, in pieces, no less, as his father had had the poor beast shipped to New Zealand. Mc-Laren had to reassemble the suspension and brakes in order to race the car.

As with all good stories, he won his first race.

Later, when he started pushing the by-now-verytired Austin too hard, he cracked the cylinder head. Tough-loving dad said, “You broke it; you fix it,” no small feat for a teenager with little access to parts. Finally able to procure a head from a 1936 Austin sedan (which bolted on but had a bigger bore), McLaren the younger filled in the entire combustion chamber with bronze and then carved out a completely new cylinder head – with a hand file. He was 15 years old. So, perhaps this meticulousness is something in the company’s DNA and not just a Ron Dennis legend.

Whatever its source, this incredible attention to detail is evident everywhere inside the glass-encased corporate headquarters. Unlike other F1 teams, for instance, Mc-Laren doesn’t feed its telemetry back to computers in the race track’s pit. Instead, information from all those multiple sensors – everything from steering angle to transmission temperature – is fed to the Woking headquarters by special high-speed communications supplied by Vodaphone (McLaren’s race car sponsors are also technological partners), where the engineers analyze the data in a less frenetic laboratory.