McLaren, one of the biggest names in global motorsport, is to enter the world of professional cycling in a bid to topple Team Sky, Telegraph Sport can reveal.

In a move which could shake up the peloton, the Woking-based company will announce on Wednesday morning at a training camp in Croatia that it is entering into a joint-venture partnership with Bahrain-Merida, the team of 2014 Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali.

Both entities are already Bahraini-owned; McLaren by Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat, and Bahrain-Merida by Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, a member of the nation’s royal family.

The partnership, which is being described as “open-ended”, will be with McLaren’s Applied Technologies and Marketing and Commercial divisions – which accounts for almost 700 staff – making Bahrain-Merida at a stroke one of the best funded, and certainly one of the best resourced, teams in the sport.

Team Sky currently lead the way in terms of WorldTour team budgets, spending around £35 million last year. That is paltry by Formula One standards. McLaren’s racing programme costs upwards of £200 million a year.

And while McLaren will be putting only a fraction of that amount into this project in terms of hard cash – the team would not discuss budgets beyond saying “there is no free ride” and their “commitment would match the team’s ambition to be the best” – even the use of its state-of-the-art facilities in Woking, including its windtunnel, plus access to Applied Technologies’ intellectual property, gives Bahrain-Merida the sort of backing of which other teams can only dream.