The first five McLaren road cars
Monday, 24 December 2018
McLaren currently builds some of the fastest, most amazing cars on the planet, but it was the company's first five cars that were truly groundbreaking. So today we take a look at those first five cars.
M6GT
The GT was developed to be a closed cockpit version of the successful M6A Can-Am car to use at Le Mans and homologate for the FIA's Group 4 regulations, however homologation never happened and only a handful of M6GTs were ever built before McLaren scrapped the project.
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After the racing car project was dropped, Bruce McLaren had two of the cars converted for road use, including one he kept for himself, realising a long-held dream of his to build a road-going sports car, something that the company would later continue with, but not for quite some time after the M6GT.
F1
Twenty five years after the M6GT McLaren unveiled its next road car and shook the world's belief in what was possible in a road legal vehicle.
The F1 was a revolution in literally every single way, from the cental position of the driver's seat to the mind-bending performance, every single millimetre of the F1 was conceived (by the incredible mind of Gordon Murray) to do one thing - go very, very fast indeed.
Although its 0 to 100km/h time of 3.7 seconds was (and, let's face it, still is) searingly fast the true impact of the McLaren F1 is reinforced by the fact that 20 years on it is still the fastest naturally aspirated car on the planet.
Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren
McLaren's next foray into the road car market came five years after the production of the F1 ended with the appearance of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren in 2003, a collaboration with it's Formula 1 engine supplier at the time.
Built by McLaren, the SLR was a stunning and remarkable car, but its ultimate expression didn't occur until almost the very end with the startlingly awesome tribute to a legendary racing driver, the SLR Stirling Moss.
Dropping such unnecessary trivialities as a roof and windscreen, the Stirling Moss was the last of the line, although McLaren did do a limited run of 'McLaren Edition' models a bit later, they used existing customer cars.
MP4-12C
In 2011 the first road-going car completely designed and produced by McLaren landed in the form of the 12C. Previous McLarens all used outside engine suppliers, while the 12C was the first time McLaren built its own engine for its own car. And what an engine it was too.
The 3.8-litre M838T is a twin turbocharged V8 that produced 441kW of power and 600Nm of torque in the 12C and has since produced even more in a number of McLaren hypercars.
But more importantly, the 12C was the car that showed the traditional supercar makers that McLaren could happily take them on and wasn't just restricted to niche hypercars.
P1
When the car largely regarded as the F1's successor (although McLaren has since said that the Speedtail is actually the F1's 'official' successor) first appeared in 2013, it marked the first time that McLaren was producing two road cars at the same time, with the 12C being produced alongside it until 2014, when it was replaced by the 650S.
The P1 shared the 12C's carbon fibre monocoque and added an electric hybrid system to the 3.8-litre V8 (with a combined output of 673kW and 980Nm) for face-melting performance, starting a formula of platform/engine sharing/extreme tweaking that sees the company produce 7 cars today.