Three sports cars with butterfly doors, high-powered engines and higher price tags zoomed around a vast lot at Sparrows Point on Friday afternoon.

Soon, literal boatloads of the vehicles will be processed at a McLaren-specific facility scheduled to open nearby in the fall of 2026.

McLaren, the storied English race car brand that began marketing to consumers 15 years ago, sells more than one-third of its inventory in the U.S. and Canada. All of those cars come through the Port of Baltimore.

Currently, McLarens are processed at a shared facility within the state-owned Dundalk Marine Terminal, but they will move to a dedicated vehicle processing center at the privately owned Tradepoint Atlantic.

The vehicles — which McLaren dubs “high-performance luxury supercars” — will continue to be manufactured in England, but workers in Dundalk will apply the finishing touches, such as floor mats, computer programming and, in some cases, paint. The center will have a specialized car wash on-site, so cars can be trucked to dealerships looking extra sleek.

“When completed, this will be the newest, most high-tech VPC [vehicle processing center] in the world, a facility truly worthy of McLaren’s name,” said Derek Meyer, McLaren Automotive’s vice president of finance.

McLaren signed a 10-year lease to rent the 50,000-square-foot facility at Tradepoint Atlantic. Nicolas Brown, president of McLaren‘s Americas division, said the facility will be “the crown jewel” of the company’s infrastructure.

Leaders from McLaren and Tradepoint Atlantic, along with local, state and federal government officials, celebrated the groundbreaking with an event Friday. Officials donned construction helmets and gold-colored shovels with McLaren’s logo, scooping a pile of dirt on a concrete lot that will eventually become the processing center.

Gov. Wes Moore had sat in the driver’s seat of a McLaren a day earlier, chatting about the car with Brown, who gave Moore a shoutout at Friday’s event.

And McLaren brass also applauded President Donald Trump for a recent trade agreement between the U.S. and the United Kingdom, lowering tariff rates. British car manufacturers now have to pay a 10% tariff instead of 27.5%.

That’s not as low as it used to be, but “we’ll take that as a win,” Meyer said.

U.S. Rep. Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Maryland Democrat, noted some general concerns regarding tariffs when he spoke but cheered on the new development.

“I think this is an important signal that investment continues, that the Baltimore region is on the move. It’s a bonus that we get some really cool cars moving here through the Baltimore region,” Olszewski said, before squeezing his 6-foot-6 frame into a McLaren and revving its engine.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, also spoke Friday. He explained that he wasn’t there “to get our football team back,” referencing the Cleveland Browns’ infamous mid-1990s relocation to become the Ravens, but rather because he’s long been an auto executive himself.

He applauded Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and predicted “certainty” on tariffs by Labor Day, while noting that he has collaborated with Democratic Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks.

After the event, McLaren invited media members to test drive a few of the supercars, which retail for over $300,000. In some cases, they can cost millions. (This reporter, terrified to wreck, ambled the racer around at 25 mph.)

The cars are exclusive. McLaren manufactures only a few thousand cars a year globally, making up a minuscule slice of the global market. Over the past 15 years, it has sold, on average, fewer than 1,000 cars a year in the U.S. and Canada.

When deciding where to center its American operations, McLaren could have chosen another East Coast location, such as Georgia, and Brown said the company considered other options. Among shipping lines, trucking routes and the infrastructure, the company decided “it just makes business sense” to remain in Baltimore.

“Baltimore is really the automotive hub,” he said in an interview.

Sparrows Point was long the site of Bethlehem Steel, once the world’s largest steel producer and the employer of 30,000 people. The company declined and eventually closed in 2012.

Over the past decade, Tradepoint Atlantic has built the site into a logistics hub, renting space to over 60 tenants. Tradepoint is owned by Redwood Holdings, which is, in turn, owned by Jim Davis, a billionaire who co-founded Allegis Group, a staffing firm.

The site has been booming and is about 75% built out, Tradepoint has said. It recently announced that a logistics company is taking over a 108,000-square-foot facility, the addition of $35 million worth of bulk cargo conveyance, which is expected to be ready by January, and an expansion into Howard County.

Tradepoint is also in the midst of building a huge shipping terminal that can accommodate two ultra-large container vessels.

Construction of the $1 billion-plus project is expected to begin next year and be completed in fall 2028.