So how was today’s McLaren launch? Intense. High profile. Professional. I must admit to being caught on the hop slightly, because for the likes of us there wasn’t really that much actual news to get our teeth into. We’ve already seen the car, got the technical details and talked to the men behind it. From our point of view today’s only real news was the addition of the performance data.

Of course I’d forgotten that for the broader, mainstream media this was their first exposure to McLaren Automotive, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the place was packed out with TV cameras, live link vans, business, financial and international media and so on. There’s got to have been 300 people there.

And Ron put on quite a show for us. He wheeled out the big guns (Jensen, Lewis, Martin Whitmarsh, Anthony Sheriff), he let us crawl over the prototype build area and chat to the blokes assembling the cars, we could poke and prod the innards of the MP4, wander around the old F1 cars, gaze at the trophy cabinet, marvel at the sheer scale and smell of success.

I did all I could not to be awed by the place, the event, the people and the buzz. Years in this business have made me pretty cynical about things like this, but I have to say I walked out of the press conference badly wanting an MP4-12C, wanting McLaren to be successful, wanting them to fly the flag for British engineering, impressed that Ron (rather well tanned for the time of year) read from stapled sheets of paper, not an autocue. They sold that car very well. Even the stage banter between the stars was, well, not too staged.

Given the legends about Ron’s OCD tendencies, it was no surprise that the place was a shrine to cleanliness, but I expected it to be soulless, clinical and it wasn’t. True, filling it up with people helped, but the atmosphere was warmer, less austere than I expected and the employees weren’t dressed like identikit Bond villains (although I have it on good authority that denim is banned from the building).

I took a load of pics and some video (you can see them by clicking on the photos and videos tabs at the top of this blog), all the while expecting to be tapped on the shoulder by security. I’ll write more later, because I was one of the very few to have lunch with Anthony Sheriff and Mark Vinnels, respectively the MD and Programme Director of McLaren Automotive.