Ron Dennis' move away from Formula One to concentrate on McLaren's new road car appears to be paying dividends, with the group set to open a new factory in Woking that will employ 800 people and produce 4,000 cars per year.

A number of those employees could be veterans of McLaren's Formula One operations, especially if future budget cuts in the sport take effect.

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"Ever since we revealed the McLaren F1 sports car in 1992, it has been a long-held dream of mine to launch a McLaren sports car company," said Dennis on the McLaren website. "Designing, developing and selling globally the best sports cars in the world is just half of that equation; building them to previously unmatched levels of quality, with ground-breaking technologies in a production facility in the UK is key to satisfying that dream."

He added: "It would be easy enough to consider building McLaren sports cars in existing productive and experienced foreign factories; a number of which are knocking on our door. However, McLaren is a great British company founded over 40 years ago that should, in my view, continue to design and build our own products."