Prodrive Tour

Wow, unbelievable day again. We made a 1.5 hour trip to the Prodrive factory around 3pm. For those of you that don't know, Prodrive is a company that builds custom racecars, and are extremely competitive in the racing world. They've worked in F1, World Rally Championship, and Lemans. Right now, main focuses are in rally and Lemans. We met up with a small group of people outside the factory before our tour. We were excited, as we could smell the brownies and cookies they ahd made for us all the way from the parking lot. The second we entered the Prodrive office, the smell disappeared. Clearly, the baked goods were in a different building. So we entered the lobby and waited for our tour guide for the day. We headed into the museum area where they had several cars on display, including a Subaru Legacy driven by Colin McRae, a BAR Honda driven by Jensen Button, and an amazing E30 BMW Rally Car. This portion of the tour was amazing because not only were we allowed to touch the cars, but we could also open the doors and peak inside. This included the car driven by McRae (very famous rally driver who passed away a year or two ago). So then we headed into the area where transmissions and engines were built. She showed us rally car transmissions and engines that were worth over $100k alone. Something interesting at Prodrive is every transmission and engine is built by a single person, which ranged from 60 hours to 120 hours to build. And they aren't paid overtime. Their reasoning about overtime is that any overtime they work, it's for the team, and that they want to win. This helps weed out engineers who are working purely for money. It also brings in the most competitive people, and keep the competitive edge. Even within the company they hold little competitions to build things and try and beat out other teams (on team was building a small raft while we were there). The next room had a nice, white, DBR9 race car being prepared for racing. Along with a wrecked LMP1 car that was in pieces but being repaired. The next area was kind of a smelly area. This was because it was a building with about 4 bays with completely stripped chassis. Basically, they strip the cars of all paint, glue, bolts, everything, chop off the noses, and start beginning the fitment for increased chassis strength and roll cages. Now, some of the rooms I'm describing you won't be able to see pictures of, simply because we weren't allowed. Some of the things going on were top secret, and some spots we weren't even allowed to see. The next room was another car building area, there was a few Aston Martin race cars that competed in different classes, and also a V12 Vantage that was driven by Jeremy Clarkson. The next room I found particularly interesting. It was the machine shop, and they had everything you could imagine. They even had about 3 or 4 CNC drills that could rotate in all different directions. I have seen videos of these machines carving out complete engine blocks from a single piece of aluminum. We then went through another work area that had a few Subaru WRX rally cars that were being built, and one in need of some minor repairs. After this we headed into my next favorite area. It was a large bay containing 3 LMP1 cars, one of them was a winner from last weekends lemans race in Germany. They had literally just been unloaded from the truck a few hours before our tour. What was neat was that one car was almost completely disassembled, while the other was mostly intact. It really highlighted what was the chassis on the car, and how big the body work was. The cars themselves are very tiny. but when all the aerodynamic body work is added, it completely changes the look of the car. It goes from being a tiny bug to a long and wide race car. After this, we headed into another room where another Subaru rally car was being worked on then headed back to the main lobby for some souvenirs. We really gained a new appreciation for the work put into a race car, and learned way more than I could squeeze into this little blog. But it was definitely a great day. And we never got our brownies though. It wasn't until the end of the tour that we learned that the Prodrive factory was sitting right next to a chocolate factory. Everybody went the whole tour waiting for cookies and brownies; man were we fooled. Also, on the way to the factory we saw a Porsche GT3RS, an Audi R8, and surprisingly, an Enzo.