In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the McLaren Group – composed of McLaren Automotive, McLaren Racing (Formula 1) and McLaren Applied (data and electronics) – has joined the Ventilator ChallengeUK consortium to help produce more medical ventilators.
The consortium is a group of significant industrial, technology and engineering businesses from across the aerospace, automotive and medical sectors.
Employing their unique blend of expertise in design, rapid prototyping, electronics and manufacturing, every McLaren company is taking part to support the consortium’s production goal of ventilators to help treat coronavirus patients.
McLaren Automotive has designed and crash tested lightweight, bespoke trolleys on which the ventilators are fixed for use in clinical settings. It is also helping to duplicate and expand the production of existing devices to meet demand by reverse engineering and building more vital test boxes to validate new ventilators
These are being hand-built in the top secret McLaren laboratory where the next generation of supercar protypes are usually created.
McLaren Racing converted its ‘machine shop’ to manufacture ventilator components while also working with 100 of their suppliers and other UK-based Formula 1 teams.
McLaren Applied is supporting the ventilator device build assessments, in particular around electronics, and is working with McLaren Automotive to provide engineering expertise to design and build ‘end of line’ test equipment, ensuring that the ventilator units meet all of the functional and safety requirements.
