Innholdsfortegnelse for Special: McLaren 2025 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

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…

I hear the Audi R8 a long time before I see it. Whole minutes earlier. The hollow, baleful wailing rises up the mountains, the sound waves washing against the rocks, slipping through the crevices. And you know what my first thought is? Not “Can’t wait to have a go in that”, more “That’s it, the polícia will be on our case within minutes.”* Supercars, even those of an everyday persuasion, tend to leave things in their wake: not least perturbed, talkative locals and readily identifiable sound waves. Especially if they’re yellow. Unless they’re a Porsche. The 911 Turbo S rolls up a few minutes later, having done the supermarket shop. The back seats contain many crisp packets and chocolate bars. There are many corners between supermarket and mountain top. I…

How much of the hyperspeedsters experience does a Caterham give you, for one thirtieth of the price? Enough, trust me. Twenty minutes of blundering with Allen keys and a fiddly wire connector divorces this 620S from its heated windscreen, replaced with pleasingly effective carbon aero ramps. Cold? Not a bit of it. The heated seats are furnaces, but the rasping side-exit exhaust keeps you just as toasty. What the Seven does better than anything else on four wheels is distil driving into its component actions. With just 610kg summoned along by 310bhp, it’s as rabidly quick up to cheek-rippling speeds as any of the unicorns, but you’re savagely busy on the way, snicking gears and feathering the gas. There’s never a moment you can’t hear exactly what the willing supercharged…

“IT’S POWERED BY A NEW V8 HYBRID POWERTRAIN WITH A COMBINED OUTPUT OF 1,257BHP” This is the W1. The difficult follow up album to the untameable P1. The hypercar that needs to make the ballistic 750S seem merely pedestrian. The one that lines up against the new Ferrari in a once in a decade face off. McLaren’s mic drop moment. Forgive me if we start with a stream of big fat numbers, but the W1 is that kind of car. It’s powered by an all new V8 hybrid powertrain with a combined system output of 1,257bhp. The 4.0-litre twin turbo V8 makes 915bhp by itself (which is more than a P1 made in total), aided by what McLaren refers to as an ‘e-module’ that throws another 342bhp in the direction…

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…

“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…

Sleek, isn’t it? Long and low and lean and, well, sleek. A streamliner. This is it, the McLaren Speedtail, the car formerly known as BP23 and likely forever known as the spiritual successor to the F1. Three seats, stratospheric top speed and a price tag that’s similarly out of this world. Facts, though, have been in short supply. And when we’re starved of facts, we feed off myths. The rumour mill spooled up with tales of a 300mph target, of Chiron beating power, and, to be fair, all we did was fan the flames. Let’s rein in hyperbole and exaggeration though, and focus on what we do know. The McLaren Speedtail, when deliveries started in early 2020, cost each of its 106 owners £1.75m for a car that boasts 1,036bhp…

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…

Let’s open with something startling: the McLaren 570S is as fast as the fabled McLaren F1. And this, let’s not forget, is the firm’s entry level car. An entry level car that hits 100mph in 6.3 seconds. Only it doesn’t. It’s faster. More on that later. Nevertheless, claiming F1 matching acceleration times is not a coincidence – there’ll have been a parameter laid down when the car was conceived, a target to be met – but as a statement of speed and intent, the numbers are revealing. McLaren calls the 570S its “luxury sports car”. Does anyone else have similar issues getting their head around the concept of the words ‘luxury’ and ‘6.3 to the ton’ appearing together? Maybe not. Maybe it’s ‘luxury’ and ‘McLaren’ that’s harder to equate? The…

I’VE JUST BEEN UNDRESSED BY A £1.4MILLION McLAREN ELVA. It’s my own fault for refusing to wear the unforgivably dweeby McHelmet designed for this roof less, screenless screamer. My cosy bobble hat substitute is forcibly ejected, dances through the heat haze across the rear deck and is lost in the slipstream. If you were in the Fiat Panda overtaken by a solid gold rocket car on the A87 near Fort William recently and pulled over to retrieve it after you’d finished laughing, could you post it on to the Inverlochy Castle Hotel? I’d like to stay again. TopGear staffers do not habitually overnight in castles, but it’s important to get into character. We’re here to rendezvous with the apex of supercar excess: speedsters. Cars devoid of shelter, practicality, and any…

Cowshit flow-vis. It plasters the Valkyrie’s barge boards, coats the delicate aero elements, clads the carbon. Provides a deeper boundary layer than regular flow visualisation paint, but less actual… flow. Although that surely depends on the bowels of the ruminant involved. Either way, safe to say it’s not a new aero engineering technique that Adrian Newey needs to keep an eye on. The smell for one thing. And if it dries on… Ah, the perils of being first up the Piedra San Martín on the French/ Spanish border early on a chilly, misty morning. The overnight deposits sit like mines on the tarmac, detonating under tyres, sending slurry shrapnel far and wide. Don’t follow too closely now. And yet there’s the GR Yaris, tucked right up behind. It’s our pest.…