BBC Top Gear Magazine Special: McLaren 2025

WHEN WE’RE DEBATING/ARGUING IN THE TG office about which company to dedicate our next one of these gorgeous bookazines to… I’ll be honest, McLaren hasn’t had much of a look in. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, BMW – all are dripping in heritage and have back catalogues as fat as a phone book… but McLaren’s road car history has been patchier than 5G. The road car division summited right out the traps with Gordon Murray’s peerless McLaren F1 in 1992 (turn to the Big Five feature on p26 to see the company it keeps), then stumbled a bit with the confused McMerc SLR in 2003 before pulling up its socks in 2009, launching the MP4-12C and with it a proper road car division that had Ferrari, Porsche and Lambo in its cross hairs.…

What’s McLaren, and when did it start making cars? McLaren is named after Bruce McLaren, the New Zealand racer/engineer who never won the F1 world championship, but set up a team that has managed exactly that 12 times so far. But the question of when McLaren started building road cars isn’t quite so straightforward – 1994 is the answer that makes most sense as that was when McLaren released the production F1. Arguably the world’s first hypercar, the three seater was revolutionary. But 26 years earlier Bruce had tried to homologate an M6A Can-Am racer for Le Mans. The project never materialised, but two road cars were made and Bruce actually used one as a daily driver. McLaren didn’t properly get going as a road car manufacturer until 2010, with…

1963 That’s a Kiwi in the middle, a tribute to Bruce’s homeland 1967 ‘Speedy Kiwi’ reflects higher speeds Bruce’s cars were now racing 1981 New motif resembles a chequered flag. Red flash is a nod to sponsor Philip Morris 1991 Simplified logo coincides with the company’s then-new road car division 1997 The ‘speedmark’ is an ode to “vortices created by a [racecar’s] rear wing” 2002 McLaren’s logo, now with a more modern font, has been much the same since 2002…

One hundred and fifty three miles an hour on the clock, on a bumpy little public back road in the British Isles, driving a Ferrari 458 Italia so yellow it’ll make your eyes flinch. There’s a matte black superbike bucking away in front, something exoskeletal and racily mutated, wearing what appears to be a slick rear tyre and making a noise like a jet engine playing a kazoo. We are, currently, having a bit of a race. There’s a rosy tint descending, and I’m urging the Ferrari on via a grip on the steering wheel that’ll need my fingerprints polishing out of the carbon fibre. The throttle pedal is welded to the floor so hard my right calf is knotting like a spun rubber band. In a perverse trick of…

“DESPITE ITS MOTORSPORT ROOTS, THE V12 HAD TO BE TRACTABLE AND WELL-MANNERED” McLaren F1 Every great story has a strong beginning, and the McLaren F1 is no different. On 8 March 1990, Gordon Murray addressed the newly recruited McLaren Cars team in the company’s Genesis HQ. The meeting lasted 10 hours. “I went into the detailed targets: maximum weight 1,000kg, maximum width 1.8m, front and rear overhangs the absolute minimum because I wanted to concentrate the mass within the wheelbase to minimise the polar moment of inertia. Aerodynamically we had to maintain the centre of pressure position, something production car manufacturers never addressed and which accounts for high speed instability. I just listed everything that was inherently bad on mid-engined sports cars and said we intended to avoid it. The…

Lamborghini Countach Sure, it’s age dependent, but this is surely the poster car of all time. The Miura may have claimed first dibs on the word ‘supercar’, but the Countach is the one that really sent jaws accelerating south at high speed. Almost 50 years since it appeared in prototype form at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show, it still does. This is probably the most outrageous looking production car ever made. Marcello Gandini had already sent car design hurtling in a quasi sci-fi direction at Bertone with 1968’s Alfa Romeo Carabo and Seventies Stratos Zero, progenitors of the so called ‘wedge’ look. These were concept cars around which the Italians pivoted away from curves and sensuality, to create a radical new idiom. Then the Countach appeared and did it for…