McLaren Automotive (Woking / UK; www.mclarenautomotive.com) recently awarded a EUR 150m contract to Austrian manufacturer Carbo Tech Composites (CTC, Salzburg; www.carbotech.at). The agreement will span eight years. The deal foresees that, starting in 2011, Carbo Tech will manufacture about 4,000 carbon fibre reinforced passenger cabins as monocoques for the new McLaren MP3-12C.

The Austrian manufacturer spent EUR 4m to build a new, 3,500 m2 production and storage facility in Salzburg and invested another EUR 5m in additional machinery for the site. The McLaren orders will create about 100 new jobs by 2014, company CEO Karl Wagner has said.

Weighing only 80 kg, the chassis is manufactured using a resin transfer moulding (RTM) technology that has been developed in-house, Carbo Tech CFO Ernst Wustinger explained, adding that the technique uses carbon fibre non-crimp fabrics of many different suppliers, including Saertex (Saerbeck / Germany; www.saertex.com). Wagner called the order a “breakthrough of carbon fibre reinforcements in industrial production.” In financial 2009, Carbo Tech’s 335 employees generated revenues of about EUR 30m. CEO Wagner is expecting 2010 sales levels to reach EUR 38m.

The MP4-12C model was independently developed by McLaren as a follow-up model to the “Mercedes McLaren SLR”, which the company had manufactured together with Daimler until 2009. The carbon fibre reinforced materials used in the Mercedes McLaren had been manufactured by Advanced Composites Group SA (ACGSA, Capetown / Republic of South Africa), a local subsidiary of prepreg manufacturer Advanced Composites Group (ACG, Heanor / UK; www.acg.co.uk). When the SLR order expired, ACG sold ACGSA to its South African competitor AAT Composites (Strand; www.aatcomposites.com) for about EUR 600,000 – see Plasteurope.com of 23.06.2010.